Drug discovery Startups funded by Y Combinator (YC) 2026

What if you could train a biological foundation model on... the entire internet? Exonic is pioneering a new generation of biological foundation models, focused on heterogeneous, unstructured, and noisy datasets. Our first application is the design of safer gene therapies. In 2025, we used AI to set a new state of the art in liver cancer targeted gene therapy, validated in vitro in our lab in San Francisco. So far in 2026, we have trained a new model with unprecedented zero-shot generalization on genomic regulatory expression in hold-out biosample datasets. More to be shared soon.

Anto is building a foundation model for microbial communities, making the gut microbiome computable for the first time. We predict drug toxicity and efficacy across diverse populations and fix drugs so they work for everyone — solving the hidden root cause of most drug failures. Founded by Arvid (Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard; Nature-published researcher who pioneered quality-aware, goal-directed sparsification) and David (Harvard Medical School Gastroenterology, J&J), second-time founders who published the breakthrough at leading machine learning AI conferences and Nature.

Finding new cures requires seeing what and where the abnormal molecules are in a diseased tissue, but current tools see less than 1% of those molecules. Biocartesian combines microscopy and new chemistries to see 50X more, offering unprecedented insights into disease biology and new therapies.

ACX is developing a new standard for precision agriculture technologies by providing sustainable, eco-friendly alternatives to chemical pesticides. Our mission is to transform agriculture through sustainable biological crop protection that increases yields while safeguarding the environment, farmers, and consumers.

Angstrom AI builds GenAI-based molecular simulations to substitute wet lab experiments in the pre-clinical drug development pipeline. We are a team of 2 PhD's and 2 Professors from the University of Cambridge who decided to start a company together after we realised how to combine breakthoughs in our research in quantum-accurate models of physics and generative AI models. Our Biotech/Pharma clients can verify the efficacy and safety of new drug candidates using our computer simulations, which match the accuracy of wet lab experiments, but are over 100x faster. We achieve this accuracy by constraining our genAI-based simulations to obey the laws of physics, avoiding the hallucinations seen in other GenAI technologies. Since joining YC, Angstrom AI has developed the first physically accurate gen-AI based simulation of multiple molecules interacting. We have published the first molecule water solubility results with accuracy within the error range of wet lab experiments. We have also kicked-off a 150K pilot project with a pharma company to apply our tech to estimating solubility in their drug development pipeline.

Velorum Therapeutics is developing breakthrough medicines by unlocking the biology of heme.

We are developing cancer therapeutics using small molecules that inhibit immune suppression. Our drugs engage the immune system to aggressively fight tumors. Our therapeutic portfolio addresses a range of solid tumors, starting with mesothelioma.

Invitris radically simplifies how we create novel biological drugs. Our patent-pending technology platform turns DNA into synthetic proteins and was recently featured in the Science magazine. It makes creating new drugs >10,000x more efficient at <100x lower costs of material. Our killer application is enabling the newest generation of synthetic bacteriophages to combat antibiotic-resistant infections, which are threatening to cause more deaths than all cancers combined.

Adventris makes cancer vaccines. Our platform solves the problem of targeting poorly immunogenic oncogenes. Our first "off-the-shelf" vaccine targets KRAS, the most common cancer oncogene. In the long run, we envision a world where every adult receives our pan-cancer vaccines annually – preventing the majority of cancer deaths. If you are interested in learning more about our approach to treat and prevent cancer, please reach out to us at contact@adventris.com

Synvivia applies chemical control over cell behavior. This allows us to optimize biomanufacturing of high-value biopharmaceutical products.

Serna Bio is developing small molecules to modulate RNA function, unlocking the potential to treat diseases driven by biology intractable by other modalities.

Relevium Medical is developing an injectable gel for knee osteoarthritis. Approximately half the population will be diagnosed with this pain and progressive disease. Right now, patients have to undergo not only repeat injections to control their pain, but also have to take strong oral medications. Because the disease is progressive and only gets worse over time, many patients end up on highly addictive, high-dose opioids. To date, we have secured $3.7 million in non dilutive funding and completed preclinical testing. We demonstrated that our drug is safe, selectively blocks nerves that transmit pain, and provides pain relief that lasts four times as long. Insurance currently pays $770 per six-monthly treatment for knee osteoarthritis. With 5 million patients in the US, this represents a $7.7 Bn market opportunity. This platform biotherapeutic can also be used to treat other joints affects by osteoarthritis such as the hip and ankle, where the same problems exist in treatment care.

GEn1E Lifesciences is a Clinical-stage, multi-target company with a unique AI platform. We develop novel, next-generation, immunomodulatory therapies for rare & inflammatory diseases with no effective treatments. Our team is supercharging the drug development cycle by applying AI to multiple-mechanism-of-action protein targets and their natural platform capabilities—creating novel therapeutics at an unprecedented pace. Our AI platform has enabled us to develop a purpose-built therapy for ARDS to reduce its $20 billion cost on society (just in the USA). GEn1E has built a rich pipeline of 21+ novel and selective immunomodulators and has plans to accelerate 2 additional devastating diseases (beyond their lead indication) to IND in the next 12 months. Our AI platform enables tremendous pace and capital efficiency as demonstrated by our progress in ~2 years with seed capital—a stark contrast to the typical spend of $100M+ and 7+ years exhibited in the pharmaceuticals / biotech industry. With ~90% of rare diseases having no therapeutic treatment at all, GEn1E is taking a giant swing that will hopefully bring life-saving therapies to the lives of patients in need. The team at GEn1E has decades of experience in drug development and machine learning. We graduated from YCombinator and Stanford-StartX in late 2019. We are based in Palo Alto, CA.

We are a drug discovery company developing a new generation of therapeutics that embrace the complexity of disease. Currently available approaches for creating drugs work on the principle of finding one drug-one protein 'magic bullets'. However, diseases such as cancer and autoimmunity are often the result of several dysregulated proteins across many distinct biological pathways. We are building a computational-experimental platform to design therapeutics that can target several disease-causing proteins at once. By designing multi-specific drugs, we are able to create therapeutics that are more efficacious and safer than existing medicines.

Our compounds disrupt the metabolic and inflammatory triggers in both cancer and quasi-cancerous cells in the tumor microenvironment. By impacting multiple cell types, we are enabling effective, lasting cancer treatments.

Engage Bio is developing mRNA immunotherapies to defeat cancer. Our founders have deep experience in immunotherapy development, including four drugs in the clinic, and in building mRNA therapeutics platforms. Our approach is to provide cancer cells with instructions to make and gradually release our drugs within solid tumors. This local therapy allows us to eliminate tumors while sparing healthy distant tissues.

Origami Therapeutics, Inc. is a biotech company developing novel protein degraders with potential to delay or halt disease progression by eliminating toxic proteins from the body. Our drug discovery platform leverages our proprietary human disease models developed to select the small molecules with the best chance of clinical success. Our first indication is Huntington’s disease, a debilitating, progressive and ultimately fatal disorder caused by a genetic mutation. We have already identified small molecules that reduce the toxic mutated protein, suppress mutant protein-induced toxicities in human disease neurons and get into the brain. We anticipate that this approach will be broadly applicable to traditionally “undruggable” targets in other neurological diseases.

We have built a platform that enables drug discovery and development for previously undruggable genome regulators ("the regulome"). We accomplish this by moving drug discovery out of artificial systems where regulome proteins fail to function properly, and back into live human cells. Our technology combines innovations in automated cell processing, next-gen proteomics, and advanced data analytics to measure a drug's effect on the entire regulome in one experiment.

In a nutshell: many diseases are caused by how much your cells squeeze (asthma, fibrosis, others). We discover drugs that control how much cells squeeze, with ease, to treat disease. We use patented bioMEMS technology to turn cell strength (cells' ability to pull/ squeeze) into a quantifiable metric in drug discovery, to help find better drugs for mechanical diseases. We screen 100,000s of drugs against numerous contractile human cell types to comprehensively map human mechanobiology (the "contractome") and identify promising drug development starting points to deliver novel medicines to treat mechanically-driven diseases including asthma, hypertension, preterm labor, fibrosis, and others.

Valink Therapeutics develops next generation antibody-based therapeutics. We identify novel mechanism of action from known targets by incorporating multiple antibody modifications at once, rapidly and scalable generating complex drug candidates (bi-/multispecificity, multivalency and drug-conjugation in a single discovery process). Our research focus is on solid tumours poorly addressed by immunotherapy.

Abalone Bio is tackling challenging undrugged targets underlying diseases affecting millions, focusing first cell-specific antibody drugs to treat obesity and metabolic disease without the GI side effects that cause 25% of GLP-1 drug patients to quit after 1 year. + High throughput experimental measurement uniquely leverages AI/ML: We’ve engineered cells to measure antibodies for pharmacological activity, not just structure or binding like others, 100 million at a time, 100X+ the throughput of others. With our large, proprietary activity datasets, we uniquely leverage ML to both unlock the discovery of rare hits and generate optimized hits for challenging targets, starting with G-protein coupled receptors (GPCRs) + Proven success: We have developed antibody agonists (activators) for 2 out of the 8 G-protein coupled receptors ever drugged by biotech. + Pharma traction: We’ve secured 3 partnerships with $3M in revenue and $125M in downstream value. + Externally validated science: We’ve been awarded $7M in non-dilutive grant funding for platform and program development.

Altay develops small molecule drugs to treat chronic liver diseases like liver fibrosis and liver cancer. Our co-founder Dr. Osman Ozes, led the first drug development program for Esbriet (Pirfenidone), resulting in the first FDA approved therapy for lung fibrosis. Esbriet is now a $1 billion/year drug and has already made over $6 billion in revenue. With a team that has over 70+ years of small molecule drug development experience, we intend to do the same with chronic liver diseases, which affects over 20 million Americans and represents a market size of over $30 billion. We know we are well positioned for success because we have shown excellent pre-clinical mouse data in several liver fibrosis models using our novel small molecule. We demonstrate a reduction in fibrosis with our drug, but more significantly, we show a reversal in fibrotic tissue back to normal tissue. With our current developmental strategy, we hope to have a clinic-ready compound by the end of 2021 and be in phase I clinical trials by mid of 2022.

90% of drug candidates fail, delaying help for those in need. We’re on a mission to change that. Better drug target discovery powered by the Newfoundland founder effect.

Arpeggio Bio is a pioneering pharmaceutical company that develops drugs targeting transcription factors using AI and high-throughput RNA-sequencing. With $20M in venture funding, we've targeted "undruggable" proteins like NRF2, TEAD, and GPX4 where our lead program is rapidly progressing towards a DC for the treatment of IO-resistant melanoma. With partnerships with J&J and FORMA, we've validated our platform in rare disease and inflammation with a significant Phase I success.

LEAH Labs is building living therapies for pets first, and their people next. We're first focused on CAR-T cell therapy for dogs with B cell lymphoma, the naturally occurring clinical analog of human non-Hodgkin's lymphoma. CAR-T cells are curative in humans, and our early results are showing the same - we're inducing remissions in pets with late stage lymphomas. Our virus-free gene editing platform allows us to engineer a dose of CAR-T cell therapy for ~$500, and brings the promise of a curative outcome. Given our safety and efficacy data to date, we believe this product could be used by general practice veterinarians, meaning we have thousands of customers all across the USA who typically treat with palliative care or refer cancer patients to specialty oncologists. Our CAR-T cell platform is regulated by the USDA, not the FDA, affording us a cost effective "full stack" to iterate and innovate on CAR-T cell therapy from a hypothesis through clinical validation.

Oncobox believes that many late-stage cancer patients are dying prematurely because doctors lack a data-driven tool to help them decide which drugs currently on the market would most effectively fight individual patients’ specific cancers. That’s where Oncobox comes in. Oncobox is low-cost personalized genetic profiling to help doctors decide which drug to use. In a recent study conducted by leading cancer researchers in Europe and Asia on 900 patients with various late-stage cancers, Oncobox increased the effectiveness of targeted therapies from 25% to 64%. How does Oncobox work? Over 150 targeted cancer drugs are currently on the market. But deciding which of these drugs to give to late-stage cancer patients is not a simple task. Cancer doctors are in a race against the clock. They don’t always know which medication will be most effective for their patients. Because these drugs are expensive and typically have significant side effects, they can’t just try them all. Because of these barriers, targeted cancer therapies are effective only 25% of the time, and 70% of patients with late-stage cancers die due to the toxic side effects of ineffective drugs. Oncobox Dx analyses tumor DNA, RNA, and molecular pathways using algorithms to distinguish which molecular targets are the most crucial for individual cases. Doctors receive a clinically actionable report that shows them which drugs are likely to be most effective on the patient. We actively seek partners from pharma, hospitals/clinicians, payers, and genomic centers. Feel free to contact us at hello@oncobox.com. Our team and the scientific advisory board consisting of leading scientists and researchers from UCLA, Stanford, Johns Hopkins University, Boston University, Tufts University, and Rutgers University.

Numerion Labs is an AI-native company accelerating the discovery of life-saving medicines through the development and use of cutting-edge machine learning algorithms. The company unites computational chemistry, structural biology, and medicinal chemistry to pioneer the next generation of AI-driven drug discovery platforms.

Notable Labs is building a personalized drug discovery platform to identify treatment options for relapsed and refractory cancer patients — starting with blood cancer — to address the long tail of cancer treatment. We look at a person’s actual cancer cells, test combinations of FDA approved drugs, and see which combinations kill the cancer cells and leave the healthy cells alive. We focus on combinations because cancer is often difficult to target with just one drug and starting with a single drug can lead to resistant clones or relapse. We're building a highly automated lab in Foster City running on our custom software and are currently testing relapsed/refractory cancer patients as well as samples from a variety of pharma/biotech partnerships. https://www.notablelabs.com/careers