Bindwell
We're building better pesticides using AI. The agrochemical industry is
stagnant, it’s time for a change.
Backed by
Y Combinator,
Character,
General Catalyst,
SV Angel,
Paul Graham, and others.
The founders [of Bindwell] will probably do alright. They’re smart and have a good idea. Paul Graham, on X
Team
We’re Navvye Anand (Caltech) and Tyler Rose (Wolfram Research), a scrappy duo of engineers who met at the Wolfram Summer Research Program in June 2023. We’re from India and China, respectively, and both close to farmlands in our countries. United by our passion for tackling global problems, we dropped out of high school / college and started Bindwell to transform the stagnant agrochemical industry.
Problem
Pesticides are failing us: their usage has doubled since 2000, even though farmland has decreased. Yet, we still lose 20–40% of crops to pests.
Resistance makes things worse: pests evolve resistance, forcing farmers to use even more pesticides to get the same results. This creates a vicious cycle of increasing resistance and collateral damage.
Innovation is stagnant: since the 2010s, fewer than 40 new active ingredients have been introduced. Most "new" pesticides are just minor tweaks of existing chemicals.
Industry left behind: AI has revolutionized drug discovery; pesticide discovery is overdue for the same transformation because the underlying biochemistry is similar.
Making better pesticides is hard: the ideal pesticide kills only pests and nothing else — current solutions poison the entire ecosystem along with their targets.
Solution
We use AI to build better pesticides.
Because pesticide discovery is a search problem, speed is key: in mere seconds, our AI models predict experimental results that would have traditionally taken days — completely changing the game for pesticide discovery.
We've built these AI models so far:
- Foldwell: our AlphaFold replacement that’s 4× faster, used to identify target structures.
- PLAPT: Insanely fast open-source protein–ligand interaction model that can scan every synthesized compound known to man in just 6 hours.
- APPT: State-of-the-art protein–protein interaction model for biopesticide screening, outperforms existing models by 1.7× on Affinity Benchmark V5.5.
We’re currently developing our first pesticide. More to come soon…