Bindwell 🧪 Launches: Building Better Pesticides with AI

Bindwell recently launched!

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^{"Building better pesticides with AI."}

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^{TL;DR - Teenage engineers on a mission to develop new pesticides for a safer, healthier, and more bountiful world. They are launching Foldwell, their breakthrough structure prediction model that runs 4x faster than AlphaFold 3. Foldwell is just one piece in a suite of ground-up models they have built for every step of the pesticide discovery pipeline.}

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‍Founded by Navvye Anand & Tyler Rose

Navvye Anand (Caltech) and Tyler Rose (Wolfram Research), a scrappy duo of engineers who met at the Wolfram Summer Research Program in June 2023. They are Indo-Chinese founders who both grew up visiting farmlands in their countries. United by their passion for tackling hard problems, they dropped out of college and started Bindwell to transform the archaic agrochemical industry.They are joined by Max, a prodigious hacker and open source contributor who dropped out of a math degree at Reed College. Max is relentlessly curious about everything from robotics to philosophy, and like them, his passion for solving challenging problems made him a perfect fit for the team.

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❌ The 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 the target pest and nothing else—current solutions are bad at this.

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✅ Their Solution:

Bindwell use AI to build better pesticides.

Because pesticide discovery is a search problem, speed is key: In mere seconds, their AI models give them biological assays that would have traditionally taken days—completely changing the game for pesticide discovery.

https://youtu.be/yI78lwS-dvQ

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They have built these AI models so far:

• Foldwell: their AlphaFold replacement that’s 4x faster, used to identify target structures.

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• 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 1.7x on Affinity Benchmark V5.5.

They are currently mapping druggable proteins in select harmful species that are notoriously difficult in the industry in order to find candidates with high specificity.

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Learn More

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^{🌐 Visit bindwell.ai to learn more.}

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^{📅 They would love to hear your feedback on the Foldwell app — Reach out to the founders here.}

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^{🤝 Warm introductions to researchers at agrochemical companies (e.g. Bayer, Syngenta, BASF, Corteva etc), would be greatly appreciated!}

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^{‍‍👣 Follow Bindwell on LinkedIn & X.}

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