# Clayton Rabideau

> Clayton Rabideau is the founder and CEO of Syntensor, a San Francisco startup building foundation models and mechanistic simulations of human cell biology to predict drug efficacy, toxicity, and the hidden causes of clinical-trial failure. A Cambridge PhD in chemical engineering and biotechnology, he works at the seam between dynamical-systems mathematics and genomics - a co-author on HyenaDNA, the NeurIPS 2023 spotlight that stretched genomic language models to a million bases of context. He is trying to make biology as fast, iterative, and programmable as software.

- **Role:** Founder & CEO at Syntensor
- **Organizations:** Syntensor, DiffEqML, University of Cambridge
- **Nationality:** American
- **Education:** PhD, Chemical Engineering and Biotechnology (computational synthetic biology), University of Cambridge
- **Known for:** Founder and CEO of Syntensor, building foundation models and mechanistic simulations for drug development and human genetics., Co-author of HyenaDNA (NeurIPS 2023 spotlight), a genomic foundation model with up to ~1 million tokens of context at single-nucleotide resolution., PhD in chemical engineering and biotechnology from the University of Cambridge.

## Career timeline

- **2016** — Begins PhD at the University of Cambridge in chemical engineering and biotechnology, focused on computational synthetic biology.
- **2019** — Founds Syntensor with Rosie Higgins in January, aiming to build a mechanistic model of human physiology.
- **2020** — Completes Cambridge PhD.
- **2023** — Co-authors HyenaDNA, a NeurIPS 2023 spotlight paper on long-range genomic sequence modeling, alongside researchers including Yoshua Bengio, Christopher Re, and Stefano Ermon.
- **2024** — Syntensor raises a seed round (Lifeforce Capital, Hula, Morningside, Lexi Ventures), reportedly valued around $20M; runs a Republic crowdfunding campaign.
- **2025** — Speaks at SynBioBeta 2025 on AI-driven drug discovery and 'reprogramming biology at cloud speed.'

## Achievements

- Founder and CEO of Syntensor, building foundation models and mechanistic simulations for drug development and human genetics.
- Co-author of HyenaDNA (NeurIPS 2023 spotlight), a genomic foundation model with up to ~1 million tokens of context at single-nucleotide resolution.
- PhD in chemical engineering and biotechnology from the University of Cambridge.
- Contributor and member of DiffEqML, maintainers of TorchDyn, an open-source neural differential equations library for PyTorch.
- Invited speaker at SynBioBeta 2025.
- Raised seed funding from Lifeforce Capital, Hula, Morningside Ventures, and Lexi Ventures.

## Latest updates

- **2025-05** — Speaking at SynBioBeta 2025 on AI-native architectures for biological engineering and predicting drug efficacy and toxicity.
- **2024-01** — Syntensor's most recent reported fundraising, a seed round.

## Links

- Website: https://syntensor.com
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/clayton-rabideau/
- Twitter/X: https://x.com/ClaytonRab
- GitHub: https://github.com/clayton-r

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Profile page: https://yespress.io/clayton-rabideau
Published by YesPress — https://yespress.io
Last updated: 2026-06-25