Aayam Bansal

Aayam Bansal is the 18-year-old co-founder and CEO of Synthetic Sciences (YC W26), a company building AI co-scientists that run the full research loop - literature, hypotheses, experiments, and paper drafts. Before college he had already patented and sold an AI orthopaedic device and built COVID-19 helpline infrastructure serving tens of thousands of Indians daily. He met co-founder Ishaan Gangwani doing machine learning research at NUS, CMU, and MIT CSAIL, publishing at venues like NeurIPS, ICML, ICLR, AAAI, and CVPR. After a paper rejection convinced them the research process itself was broken, the pair raised roughly $1.5M and dropped out before their first college semester to fix it.