yale-spinout
(5)
CellType
CellType is a Y Combinator W26 biotech startup building an 'agentic drug company' that simulates human biology to de-risk drug discovery. Founded by Yale professor David van Dijk and ML engineer Ivan Vrkic, it pairs Cell2Sentence, a 27-billion-parameter biological foundation model built with Google DeepMind, with AI agents that run the discovery pipeline from hypothesis to compound screening. The goal is to replace animal models and cell lines with computational simulations of human biology and cut preclinical failure rates.
Bexorg, Inc.
Bexorg is a New Haven techbio company that perfuses donated, postmortem human and pig brains with custom-made artificial blood to restore their molecular and metabolic activity, turning whole organs into living-tissue testbeds for drug discovery. Its BrainEx wet-lab platform and XO Digital AI engine generate petabyte-scale human brain datasets that let pharmaceutical partners test therapies in human-relevant tissue before costly clinical trials - a direct response to the roughly 95% failure rate of central-nervous-system drugs.
Brian Hotchkiss
Brian Hotchkiss is the Chief Business Officer of Bexorg, a Yale University spinout building the first integrated AI and whole-human-brain platform for central nervous system drug discovery. A chemical engineer turned biotech dealmaker, he spent nearly seven years at Stealth BioTherapeutics shaping corporate strategy and helping land a transformative Alexion collaboration, then served as Chief Business Officer at Protego Biopharma before joining Bexorg. He pairs four graduate-level degrees in engineering, biology, and business with a career spent translating hard science into partnerships, capital, and commercial strategy.
Simcha Therapeutics
Simcha Therapeutics is a clinical-stage biopharmaceutical company in New Haven, Connecticut that uses directed evolution to engineer next-generation cytokine immunotherapies for cancer. Its lead program, ST-067, is a first-in-class 'decoy-resistant' interleukin-18 (IL-18) variant engineered to evade the natural decoy protein (IL-18BP) that tumors exploit to silence the immune system. Spun out of Aaron Ring's lab at Yale School of Medicine and backed by $40M in Series B financing, Simcha is advancing ST-067 through Phase 1/2 trials in solid tumors and partnering with Janssen to armor CAR T cell therapies.
CREW Carbon
CREW Carbon is a Yale-spinout water and climate technology company based in Hamden, Connecticut. It retrofits municipal and industrial wastewater treatment plants with a closed-system enhanced-weathering process: dosing alkaline minerals into wastewater to convert dissolved CO2 into stable bicarbonate. The approach lowers operating costs and improves treatment performance for utilities while permanently and measurably removing atmospheric carbon, which it sells to corporate buyers as durable carbon removal credits.