Daphne Koller

Daphne Koller (born 1968 in Jerusalem) is one of machine learning’s most decorated figures: a Stanford computer-science professor for nearly two decades, a MacArthur “genius” fellow in 2004, and author of a canonical textbook on probabilistic graphical models. In 2012 she co-founded Coursera with Andrew Ng, bringing university courses — including the machine-learning classes that trained a generation of AI engineers — to tens of millions of learners.

Machine learning as a drug-discovery engine

In 2018, after a stint at Alphabet’s longevity company Calico, Koller founded insitro to attack drug discovery’s brutal economics with machine learning. The company pairs automated wet labs generating enormous biological datasets with models that predict disease biology, and has raised roughly $700 million while striking discovery partnerships with pharma companies including Bristol Myers Squibb and Gilead. Koller describes herself as “bilingual” — fluent in both biotechnology and machine learning — and told Forbes the integrated team is “really our secret sauce.”

Koller is careful to position her optimism against the field’s hype: in the same 2022 McKinsey interview where she predicted a paradigm shift, she warned that anyone promising “100 drugs in the clinic in three years” was wrong too. Her claim is narrower and, she argues, better supported — that machine learning will touch and accelerate every facet of how medicines are discovered and developed, the way computing itself did.