Two teenage founders walked into Y Combinator co-founder Paul Graham’s backyard with an idea that no one in agriculture seemed to want: an AI model to help design better pesticides. By the time they left, they had a new business model, a new company, and eventually, Graham’s backing.
Now, that reimagined company, Bindwell, has raised six million dollars in a seed round. The round was co-led by General Catalyst and A Capital, and it included a personal check from Graham himself. Rather than selling AI tools to legacy agrochemical giants, the startup is using its own models to design new pesticide molecules in-house and license the intellectual property directly. This shift in strategy is aimed at modernizing a legacy industry still dominated by decades-old chemistry.
Pesticide use in agriculture has doubled over the last three decades. Yet according to the UN Food and Agriculture Organization, up to forty percent of global crop production is still lost to pests and diseases every year. As pests evolve and develop resistance, farmers are forced to use increasing amounts of chemicals just to maintain the same yields. This cycle damages ecosystems and accelerates resistance even further. Regulatory pressure is mounting, but most agrochemical companies still rely on tweaking legacy compounds. Bindwell is betting that AI can break the cycle by discovering entirely new, more targeted molecules designed from scratch for modern challenges.
Founded in 2024 by Tyler Rose, age 18, and Navvye Anand, age 19, Bindwell adapts AI-led drug discovery techniques to agriculture. The goal is to speed up how new pesticide molecules are identified and tested.
Bindwell began as a research project in late 2023 when Rose and Anand were students at the Wolfram Summer Research Program. They initially focused on a drug discovery AI model called PLAPT, which involved binding affinity prediction. This work was later cited in a Nature Scientific Reports paper on cancer therapeutics. In 2024, they began exploring how the same approach could be applied to pesticides.
Both founders had personal exposure to the problem. Rose learned about the challenges of pest control from his aunt, who farms in China. Anand’s family owns farmland in Delhi, where he saw firsthand how limited pesticide options affected crop yields.
Rose and Anand entered Y Combinator’s Winter 2025 batch with plans to build AI models and sell access to major agrochemical companies. They did not find traction, as most industry players were reluctant to adopt AI as a core part of pesticide discovery. Midway through the program, they were invited to Paul Graham’s home for a forty-five minute conversation on the back patio.
After hearing about their challenges, Graham suggested a different approach. He proposed that rather than selling tools, they could use their own models to discover new pesticide molecules themselves. That conversation marked the beginning of Bindwell’s current direction.
Bindwell has developed its own AI suite designed to reduce hallucination, a common issue where models produce unreliable outputs. The software includes Foldwell, a structure prediction model which is a fine-tuned version of DeepMind’s AlphaFold, used to identify target protein structures. It also includes PLAPT, an open-source protein-ligand interaction model capable of scanning every known synthesized compound in under six hours, and APPT, a protein-protein interaction model for biopesticide screening that is reported to outperform existing tools. Moreover, the suite incorporates an uncertainty quantification system that flags when results are trustworthy and when more data is needed.
Together, Bindwell’s models can analyze billions of molecules and deliver four times faster performance than DeepMind’s AlphaFold 3. The AI helps identify proteins that are unique to a specific pest but absent in humans, beneficial insects, or aquatic organisms. Once those proteins are found, designers can create something that binds to them and stops them from working.
Bindwell is currently testing the efficacy of its AI-generated molecules at its lab in San Carlos. It is also working with a third-party partner to further validate the models. The startup is in early discussions with several global agrochemical firms, with its first partnership deal expected to close soon. Bindwell has also begun talks with stakeholders in India and China to conduct field tests.
The startup currently has a team of four and also works with external contractors for molecule synthesis. Bindwell’s seed round also included participation from SV Angel. Prior to joining Y Combinator’s Winter 2025 batch, the startup raised a pre-seed round from Character Capital.