The bet starts with a shark that doesn’t get cancer and a bat that shrugs off viruses. Intertwined Biosciences, a four-person team in Cambridge, Massachusetts, raised a $2.5 million pre-seed round this April to find out why. Their premise is simple: evolution has already solved many of the diseases that kill humans. The company’s job is to translate those solutions into drugs.
Founded in 2025, the startup is using an AI-driven discovery platform to analyze the genomes of evolutionarily resilient animals. The goal is to identify disease-resistance and regenerative mechanisms, then validate them in a wet lab for potential human therapeutics. It’s a high-risk, high-reward play in a crowded AI biotech field, but one backed by a specific kind of non-dilutive capital: access to over $15 million in specialized lab equipment and space.
The Comparative Biology Wedge
While competitors like Exscientia, Genesis Therapeutics, and Generate:Biomedicines focus on de novo protein design or mining human clinical data, Intertwined is building its proprietary dataset from the animal kingdom. The scientific co-founders, Evan Appleton and Jenhan Tao, bring direct experience from George Church’s lab at Harvard and from Generate:Biomedicines, respectively. Their wedge is a belief that comparative mammalian biology offers a richer, evolution-validated starting point for discovering novel therapeutic pathways than purely computational approaches.
The early validation is more about resource access than revenue. In March, the company was selected for the second cohort of the LabCentral AI BioHub, a partnership between the renowned incubator LabCentral and investor C10 Labs. The package included $200,000 in cloud credits and, more critically, wet-lab space and equipment worth over $15 million [Intertwined Biosciences, March 2026]. For a pre-seed startup, this effectively provides a capital-efficient path to early experimental validation, a significant moat against other garage-bound AI drug discovery plays.
The Team Behind the Thesis
The founding trio has been assembled to cover the three core competencies of a modern biotech: scientific discovery, technical platform building, and company building.
| Role | Name | Prior Experience |
|---|---|---|
| CEO & Co-Founder | Max Rye | Co-founded TurtleTree, helped raise >$40M [Intertwined Biosciences, 2026]. |
| CSO & Co-Founder | Evan Appleton | PhD, Boston University; postdoc in George Church's lab; led Stem Cell Biology at Colossal Biosciences [Intertwined Biosciences, 2026]. |
| CTO & Co-Founder | Jenhan Tao | PhD, UC San Diego; early scientist at Generate:Biomedicines, building ML systems for protein design [Intertwined Biosciences, 2026]. |
This blend is intentional. Rye provides the entrepreneurial track record and operational know-how from scaling TurtleTree. Appleton offers deep stem cell and comparative biology expertise from his work on elephant iPSCs at Colossal. Tao brings the machine-learning and genomics engineering chops needed to build the discovery platform. Early hires like scientist Devon Fitzpatrick, with a background in animal biology and AI tools from Colossal, further double down on the cross-disciplinary theme [LinkedIn, 2026].
Where the Model Could Stumble
The ambition is vast, but the path to a marketable therapy is long and littered with failed experiments. The company’s model faces several inherent pressures that its $2.5 million war chest must navigate.
- The long road to revenue. No pharmaceutical partnerships or licensing deals are yet public. The business model,likely biopharma partnering,requires reaching a preclinical asset milestone, a process measured in years and additional funding rounds far larger than this pre-seed.
- Algorithmic discovery risk. The core bet is that AI can correctly identify translatable mechanisms from animal genomes. This is an unproven discovery engine; a string of negative wet-lab results could stall momentum before a lead candidate emerges.
- A crowded field. The competitive set is broad, from AI-native drug designers like Exscientia to diagnostic AI players like PathAI. Intertwined’s differentiation rests on its unique biological dataset, but it must still out-execute well-funded peers on the computational and validation fronts.
The non-dilutive LabCentral support mitigates some early burn rate concerns, but the clock is ticking. The next twelve months will be about converting cloud credits and lab access into a pipeline of validated biological insights that can attract a Series A.
The Next Validation Hurdle
For now, the signal is in the backing. The April pre-seed round was led by Boost VC and Plug and Play Tech Center, with participation from C10 Labs [LinkedIn, April 2026]. These are investors betting on the team and the novel dataset angle at its earliest, riskiest stage. The $2.5 million provides runway; the $15 million lab access provides a crucial tool.
The question for Rye and his team isn’t about building the platform,it’s about what they find with it. Can they move from analyzing shark genomes to nominating a viable drug target within 18 months? The answer will determine if their next round is a biotech-focused Series A or an extension. For a field littered with promising platforms that never found a drug, Intertwined’s bet on millions of years of animal evolution is a compelling, if unproven, twist.
Sources
- [Intertwined Biosciences, March 2026] Introducing Intertwined Biosciences: AI-Driven Therapeutics | https://www.linkedin.com/posts/activity-7439672015067840515-yYl9
- [Intertwined Biosciences, March 2026] Intertwined Biosciences Launches AI-Driven Cell Therapies | https://www.linkedin.com/posts/evan-appleton_today-is-a-big-day-intertwined-biosciences-activity-7439678918120382464-K2Pa
- [LinkedIn, April 2026] Intertwined Biosciences Closes Pre-Seed Raise | https://www.linkedin.com/posts/evan-appleton_ai-evolution-activity-7447654929932132353-PEC_
- [Intertwined Biosciences, 2026] Company Information and Team Background | https://www.intertwined.bio/
- [LinkedIn, 2026] Devon Fitzpatrick - Intertwined Biosciences | https://www.linkedin.com/in/dsfitzpa/