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

Summary

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. 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 IP directly — a shift in strategy aimed at modernizing a legacy industry still dominated by decades-old chemistry. 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. 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 — ones designed from scratch for modern challenges. 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. In 2024, they began exploring how the same approach could be applied to pesticides. B...