Vantage

S'26

Simulate competition on demand.

AI / ML, Healthcare

About

Vantage provides a platform for pharmaceutical companies to simulate how their competitors would react to market signals. This practice is currently done by human consultants, spending months and 6-figures for a single simulation. With Vantage, companies can simulate in days at a fraction of the cost.

Product

On Vantage, users pick automatically surfaced signals affecting their company’s drug portfolio. Then, they pick the competitors, regulators and stakeholders they wish to involve in the simulation. The user then gives an action that their company may take and lets the personas react accordingly. Hundreds of iterations are run, each with their own randomized assumptions. At the end, the simulation returns with a probability map, competitor playbook and decision matrix, allowing company executives to make the best decisions they can.

Founders

Darren Tsang

Darren studies AI and Business at USC and is completing his Masters at the Iovine and Young Academy, focused on the intersection of computer science and design. He has worked in product roles at NVIDIA and Acer, and has led high growth teams across multiple startups. He was also the former President of TroyLabs, USC’s student startup accelerator, and he helped portfolio companies raise over $50 million. He is an incoming Forward Deployed Engineer at Persona and is currently building at the intersection of AI and enterprise pharma strategy.

Xinyi Yao

Designer

Xinyi is exploring the intersection of design and brand storytelling as an incoming Visual Design Intern at ByteDance. She currently leads design at BUFFS, an emerging CPG snack brand, and previously shipped brand work for Im'peccable Chicken, featured on Shark Tank. Iovine and Young Academy at USC, minor in Advertising, with a background in fine arts.

Tony Fernandes

Developer

Tony is exploring the intersection of machine learning research and applied AI as an incoming MLE Intern at Apple. He cofounded MAIIA, an accessibility startup delivering AI-generated audio descriptions for visually impaired users across 10+ languages. At USC's Center for AI in Society, he has contributed to computer vision and NLP research on Operation Pangolin, where his work on illegal wildlife trafficking earned a Google-sponsored award for best undergraduate presentation at ShowCAIS.

Vito Zou

Developer

Vito is a software engineering intern at Salt AI, building developer tooling and Kubernetes systems for a sovereign AI orchestration platform that lets enterprises run agentic workflows on their own data without vendor lock-in. At his previous internship, he led the zero-to-one development of a serverless cloud platform for PDF design, and was a software engineer at Viola, a company building at the intersection of AI and music licensing. As a CURVE Fellow at USC's Information Sciences Institute, he researched bot-driven misinformation and authored a paper at AAAI ICWSM 2025.