Bindwell — a company co-founded by MVHS alum Tyler Rose ‘25 and CalTech freshman Navvye Anand that develops AI models to help engineer pesticides — has been accepted into the Winter 2025 cohort of Y Combinator. Y Combinator is a prestigious San Francisco-based startup accelerator that provides companies it views as having potential for growth with industry connections and credibility. The selection process is done through an open call for applications and is highly competitive, with a 1% acceptance rate. Its top companies include AirBnB, Reddit and DoorDash.
Rose believes using AI to develop pesticides will lower the cost of production and make his company competitive. When he began the project he had some background in machine learning research with GPUs through CUDA which is a computer programming platform developed by Nvidia that allows software to utilize GPUs. With his co-founder and other people he met during his time at the Wolfram summer program, Rose started a drug discovery model called PLAPT. The development of super accurate, lightweight models for drug discovery led him to see business potential. Specifically, in relation to agriculture and pesticides industries, seeing as they have been slower to adopt AI.
“We have a bunch of the state-of-the-art AI models that we’re selling to biologists who work at agrochemical companies, because the current ones that they use are out of date and slow and not very easy to use from what we talk to them,” Rose said. “We basically offer cheaper, faster, more accurate alternatives that’ll help the bottom line of these companies. And we also work with these companies to refine our models on their proprietary data.”
The company initially received funding from Character, a venture capital seed fund, after Rose and Anand connected with them through LinkedIn. They then applied to Y Combinator through the company website, soon after on Nov. 22, on the same day Bindwell’s co-founders had an interview with Y Combinator, they were informed that they had been accepted.
“The plan is for this to work out,” Rose said. “If I were to follow the Y Combinator book and this grows to a multi-billion dollar or billion-dollar company, that is going to be 10 years, at least, of my time. They love saying ‘For the next 10 years of your life,’ even though it’s kind of like not that true, but they love saying that type of thing to make you understand, this is a huge commitment that you’re taking on, and you need to be ready to do this for the next 10 years.”
Rose was able to graduate early from MVHS after the first semester of his senior year, in the 2024-2025 academic year. His counselor, Sylvia Lam, helped Rose arrange this, and he took online classes at Brigham Young University to ensure he completed the necessary credits to graduate. He also hopes to go to college after taking a gap year because of the valuable experience it would offer.
“I couldn’t believe it,” Rose said. “My co-founder and I did pretty good, but at the same time, because Y Combinator was very skeptical about us — with me being in high school and him just being a freshman in college — we were like, ‘They’ll probably not accept this.’ But then we were super surprised.”
