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

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