Bindwell is a revolutionary new startup that Tyler Rose, 18, and Navvye Anand, 19, founded in 2024. They’ve knocked it out of the park, successfully closing on a $6 million seed funding round. The growth equity funding round was co-led by General Catalyst and A Capital. Paul Graham, co-founder of Y Combinator, was influential. Bindwell is a startup on a mission to transform the $5 trillion agricultural industry. It is repurposing AI techniques, developed to aid drug discovery, for novel pesticide creation.
Their motivation as founders comes from each of their deep personal connections to agriculture. Dangers of pest control Tyler and his family members first learned about the difficulties in agriculture pest control from his aunt who farms in China. At the same time, Navvye Anand experienced the consequences of insufficient pesticide availability on agricultural productivity firsthand through his family’s farmland in Delhi. Their shared passion for addressing these challenges led them to establish Bindwell, with a specific goal: to expedite the identification and testing of new pesticide molecules.
Both founders took a radical departure from the status quo pesticide discovery approach. They took to heart Paul Graham’s advice, hacked together some models of their own, and set out to use those models to identify new pesticide molecules. “The way most pesticides are discovered right now is not target-based,” Tyler Rose stated, highlighting the limitations of existing approaches.
Bindwell’s suite of AI tools, “Deep Learning for Sustainable Pesticide Discovery,” are purpose-built for each phase of pesticide discovery and development. One of these tools is the PLAPT. This new open-source protein-ligand interaction model is capable of scanning every known synthesized compound in less than six hours, many-fold faster than existing technologies. APPT is a robust assay tailored for the biopesticides screening pipeline based on PPI. It has allegedly surpassed all current tools by 1.7x on Affinity Benchmark v5.5.
A critical element of Bindwell’s technology is its uncertainty quantification system. This system systematically penalizes reliable results. It signals when additional data is warranted, leading to a more reliable testing process. Innovation of this kind couldn’t come at a better time. During the past 30 years we have doubled pesticide use in agriculture—in industrial farming alone pesticides and diseases continue to destroy up to 40% of global agricultural production annually.
Bindwell is still in the early days and run by a small core team of four, supplemented by contractors to carry out molecule synthesis. The startup has been working with a third-party partner to continue validating its models. Bindwell is still in the process of being introduced to its market. They are in advanced conversations with multiple other global agrochemical companies and expect to close their first partnership agreement shortly.
We’re not in the business of selling AI models, we’re not in competition with other companies that sell models,” said Tyler Rose. Bindwell’s honesty about their business direction is a refreshing sign of their commitment to the agricultural industry. Their pragmatic approach has them develop highly targeted solutions, avoiding the slapdash AI market.
If you ask their founders, there’s no stopping Bindwell. “A year from now, we want to be entering into our licensing deals with some of these companies,” Tyler Rose expressed, outlining their intention to establish significant partnerships within the industry.
Paul Graham, an icon in the broader startup ecosystem, couldn’t have been more encouraging to these young founders. “The founders [of Bindwell] will probably do alright,” he remarked, indicating his belief in their potential for success.
