🚀 @ycombinator. 🤝 An acquisition. 💰 $2.6M+ in funding and fellowships. That's our 2026 @SynBioBeta Next-Gen Bio-leader alumni just 4 months post conference; 2027 applications just opened 👀
🔗 https://t.co/q4isaW77FM
Next-Gen BioLeaders is a one-day program at SynBioBeta for students, postdocs, early-career academics and pre-seed founders in programmable biology. You spend the day with biotech investors and founders who have built companies from scratch: VC masterclasses, small-group mentorship, a founders lunch and curated introductions.
Here's what the 2026 cohort has done since May:
☘️ Nitroduck | Matej Zámečník, Matúš Grieš, Miroslav Rosputinský
Just got into Y Combinator (F26).
🛡️ TwentyTwo (YC S25) | @_harm0n, Evan Seeyave
Acquired by @LatchBio. They now lead Latch Biosecurity.
🧪 @cypherbio | @yaoyuyang
$2M seed led by @MaCVentureCap for an AI operating system for lab work.
☀️ Solio Bio | Nathan Paumier
Came out of stealth backed by Replicator VC. @jaykeasling just joined the scientific advisory board.
🫧 Flux Bio | Marika Ziesack
Launched as a @Harvard / @wyssinstitute spinout to fix gas transfer in fermentation.
🦠 Outpost Bio | Jenny Yang
Released Waypoint, a foundation model for microbial communities.
💾 BioCompute | @anagha_dna
Moved from Bengaluru to San Francisco to build DNA data storage chips.
🧬 LUCAI Bio | Joaquin Ortiz Masllorens
Won the South Summit pitch competition and Best Entrepreneur at the Puentes de Talento accelerator.
🐛 Yeast Bay Bio | Nazzy Pakpour
Raised from the California Innovation Fund for yeast-based pest control.
🔬 On the research side:
Sam Oliveira won a $302K @DARPA Director's Fellowship, one of seven awarded.
🪴 Nolux | Elizabeth Hann joined @activatefellows with her company Nolux and leads a Wyss Validation Project.
@YeshDoctor was co-first author on a @NatureBiotech paper.
If you're building in biology and want to meet the people who fund and scale it, this is your day. Selected participants receive a complimentary conference pass and up to $500 travel support.
🔗 https://t.co/q4isaW77FM
Most pathogenicity tools just give a score.
We plugged AlphaMissense straight into Mutation Simulator real model output, not a proxy. Biggest edge: disordered regions, where BLOSUM-style scores often guess.
Early days. Tracking where it matches published data and where it doesnt
Sometimes founders who i talk with think that raising money from our community is an easy ride, it is not.
Founders need to do three things to be successful with us.
1. Build in public. Posting daily on X and soon on openlabs, and the content must be high-quality, no AI slop.
2. Make sure the content is understandable by anyone without a scientific background.
3. Keep posting and pushing updates after the raise. The raise is just the beginning.
@anagenxyz in our ecosystem posts two to three times a day
If you are interested in building in public and getting funding from a community you build, my DMs are open
In 1997, a developer publicly told Steve Jobs he had no idea what he was talking about. Jobs paused and answered with the most important business lesson ever delivered under pressure.
Bookmark & watch today, no matter what.
Instinct is in talks to raise about $1 billion at a roughly $10 billion valuation, less than a month after raising $250 million at a $2.25 billion pre-money valuation.
The 23-year-old founder Noah Shinn is building a personal AI agent that can operate software and complete tasks like answering emails, negotiating bills and booking reservations.
Instinct now has more than 100,000 users and has already run into compute capacity constraints as demand grows.
Its valuation has gone from roughly $50 million in the spring to $10 billion under discussion today.
Source: The Information