Founder · Builder · LatchBio
Alfredo
Alfredo
Andere
He left Berkeley one semester short of a degree to give biologists the tools big tech kept for itself.
Co-founder & CEO, LatchBio · San Francisco
He left Berkeley one semester short of a degree to give biologists the tools big tech kept for itself.
There is a dinosaur emoji in his name on LinkedIn. Alfredo Andere runs a company trying to turn biology into something a computer can read - and he is doing it with the deadpan confidence of someone who already ran the numbers.
Today Andere is the co-founder and CEO of LatchBio, a San Francisco company building cloud and machine-learning infrastructure for the people who study living things. The pitch is blunt: biologists working on cancer, on aging, on the hardest problems anyone can name, were still downloading files to a laptop and wrestling CSVs by hand. Meanwhile the tools Andere had used at Google and Facebook - for ad clicks and feed ranking - were a decade ahead. He decided that gap was the whole opportunity.
LatchBio sells modular, programmable data infrastructure so scientists can analyze biological data fast and at scale without becoming cloud engineers first. The first concrete thing the company shipped was a workflow orchestrator: feed it enormous genomic files, get back human-readable results. The company's manifesto goes further, arguing that bench experiments are becoming a kind of machine code - basic instructions run by robots - and that the world needs the data layer to match.
The numbers tell the rest. An oversubscribed $5M seed led by Lux Capital. A $28M Series A led by Coatue. A 2026 Series B that brought reported total funding to $163M. A Forbes 30 Under 30 nod somewhere in the middle of it. Roughly thirty people now work under a vision he wrote down before most of them were hired.
A lot of decisions when you're doing a startup come down to being naive enough to not know how hard it's going to be - and taking that leap of faith.
Andere was born in Mexico City and raised in Guadalajara. He landed at UC Berkeley to study Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, and somewhere along the way collected the kind of resume that usually ends with a comfortable job: a stint at Google working on the TensorFlow-NumPy framework, data engineering at Facebook, the presidency of Machine Learning at Berkeley. He has said he showed up needing to catch up on math and decided that dedication, not pedigree, would close the gap. He kept betting on that instinct.
The two people he bet alongside were friends he had known since freshman year - Kenny Workman, now CTO, and Kyle Giffin, now COO. Andere credits the chemistry between them as the actual foundation of the company. Their habit was to argue hard, disagree loudly, then commit together and move. In their senior semester they realized school was eating the hours their startup needed. So, in a cascade of mutual instigation, they dropped out around February 2021.
What happened next is the part that separates LatchBio from a thousand dorm-room ideas. Instead of rushing to build, the trio went to a Taiwan incubator for about two and a half months on a program that handed them $50K and living expenses. There they ran roughly 300 customer interviews across biopharma, filling more than 200 pages of notes on how data actually moved inside labs. By the end they had six potential customers willing to pay. Only then did they write product code.
~300 interviews, 200+ pages of notes, six paying customers lined up - all before the first feature shipped.
The founders asked whether they could spend 10-20 years on a problem. Only biology earned a yes.
The infrastructure Google and Facebook used for ads, pointed instead at the genome.
Humans designed computers to be legible to humans. Evolution optimized biology for survival, not for our comprehension.
Andere went in expecting to raise about $2 million. Investors had other plans. Here is the climb, round by round.
Lead investors: Lux Capital (seed), Coatue (Series A). Reported cumulative funding: $163M.
We asked ourselves whether we could dedicate 10 to 20 years to this. Only biology got a yes.
Be naive enough not to know how hard it's going to be, then take the leap.
Born in Mexico City, raised in Guadalajara, building in San Francisco.
Worked at both Google and Facebook before he turned 25.
Validated the whole company with ~300 interviews before writing product code.
Carries a dinosaur emoji in his professional name - a wink at LatchBio's culture.
Named to the Forbes 30 Under 30 list.
Wants to build the data infrastructure of the biocomputing revolution.
Upgrade biology's infrastructure until a scientist can treat an organism the way an engineer treats a program.
Sequencing data has been doubling roughly every two years since 2011. Datasets now run to a hundred million cells. The old habit - download, open, scroll - simply does not survive that scale. Andere's wager is that the lab of the next decade looks less like a wet bench and more like a compiler, and that whoever builds the data layer underneath it gets to shape what comes out. He has spent five years and $163 million making sure that layer exists.