Teen founders raise $6M to reinvent pesticides using AI - and convince Paul Graham to join in | TechCrunch

"Two teenage founders walked into Y Combinator co-founder Paul Graham's backyard with an idea 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 $6 million in a seed round, co-led by General Catalyst and A Capital, with a personal check from Graham himself."

"Pesticide use in agriculture has doubled over the last three decades, yet up to 40% of global crop production is still lost to pests and diseases every year, per the UN Food and Agriculture Organization. As pests evolve and develop resistance, farmers are forced to use increasing amounts of chemicals just to maintain the same yields - a cycle that damages ecosystems and accelerates resistance even further."

"Founded in 2024 by Tyler Rose, 18, and Navvye Anand, 19, Bindwell adapts AI-led drug discovery techniques to agriculture, with the goal of speeding 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 - work that was later cited in a Nature Scientific Reports paper on cancer therapeutics."

Bindwell raised $6 million in a seed round co-led by General Catalyst and A Capital, including a personal check from Paul Graham. The startup designs and licenses novel pesticide molecules in-house using AI models adapted from drug discovery techniques. The company aims to modernize an agrochemical industry that remains dependent on decades-old chemistry and incremental tweaks. Pesticide use has doubled over three decades while up to 40% of global crop production is lost annually to pests and diseases, and resistance is increasing. Bindwell originated as a late-2023 research project using a PLAPT binding affinity model and was founded in 2024 by Tyler Rose and Navvye Anand.

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