Biotechnology & biosecurity · Biothreat diagnostics

AminoAnalytica

A London founded, Imperial College spinout that began by selling AI tools to redesign industrial enzymes and peptides. It now describes itself as an AI scientist for biosecurity, aiming to build point of care diagnostics for emerging biological threats in weeks rather than a year.

A housemate, a masters project, and a pitch competition

The company traces back to a single MEng project. Abhi Rajendran, then an undergraduate in Imperial College London's Department of Materials, spent his final year project working with Dr Stefano Angioletti-Uberti on protein modelling. When the early results looked promising, he called his housemate Adam Wu, who had just graduated from the same department with a background in materials science, tissue engineering and biosensing as a Thermo Fisher Scholar.

The two used Adam's business consulting experience to size the market, then applied to Imperial's Venture Catalyst Challenge, the university's entrepreneurship competition, and were accepted onto the 2024 AI x Robotics track. AminoAnalytica went on to win that track, a result Imperial's own blog says secured the company 10,000 British pounds in funding. Weeks later, the pair were accepted into Y Combinator's Summer 2024 batch.

A third co-founder, Matteo Peluso, a bioinformatics PhD holder from the University of Zurich, joined soon after. UK company filings show Peluso was appointed a director of the founding UK entity on 1 May 2024, three weeks after Rajendran and Wu had incorporated it.

What the company set out to sell

The original pitch was industrial, not medical. In its first Y Combinator launch post, the team described a plan to make "next generation proteins" for outside markets: enzymes for fish feed in aquaculture, peptide drugs with better stability for pharma, enzymes for carbon capture in climate tech, and safer enzymes for consumer goods. The problem, as Rajendran explained to Imperial's blog, was cost. Screening a single candidate protein in a wet lab can run over 1,000 dollars, and most candidates fail. AminoAnalytica's pitch was to predict a protein's properties computationally first, so a lab only tests the proteins likely to work.

A second Y Combinator launch, for a product called Amina, reframed the company as an agent platform rather than a prediction service. Amina was pitched as a conversational AI agent that could chain together more than 50 specialized computational biology tools on a customer's behalf, described in the launch post as an attempt to remove the "fragmented ecosystem" and "constant obsolescence" that the founders said made protein engineering software hard for working scientists to use.

The turn toward biosecurity

By the time of this profile, AminoAnalytica's own website carried a different message entirely. Its homepage title reads "Protecting Civilization from Biological Threats," and the company describes itself as designing point of care diagnostics for emerging biological threats. The stated aim shifted from optimizing industrial proteins to building an always on system for detecting biological threats early, a business framed around pandemic preparedness rather than pharma or agriculture services.

The public record shows the company's UK legal history was short and does not extend past that pivot. AMINOANALYTICA LTD, the company Rajendran and Wu incorporated on 11 April 2024, filed a nominal statement of capital of 0.01 British pounds per share on 1 May 2024, then applied to strike itself off the register on 24 June 2024 and was formally dissolved on 17 September 2024, five months after it was formed. Crunchbase separately lists the company's legal name as AminoAnalytica Inc., which points to a later flip into a different, non UK entity, a common step for founders going through Y Combinator. No SEC Form D or EDGAR filing for either name turned up in this research.

What is proven, and what is still claimed

Read plainly, the parts of AminoAnalytica's story that show up in a public record are academic and institutional: a masters project, a university pitch competition prize, a short lived UK company, and a co-authored paper that ties the founders to their chief scientist's lab. The commercial story, including how much money the company has actually raised, what it earns, and where its team is based, rests almost entirely on business data aggregators that disagree with each other and with the company's own site.

What to watch

• Whether AminoAnalytica names a diagnostic product, a regulatory pathway, or a customer for its stated biosecurity work.
• Whether a Form D or other SEC filing appears under AminoAnalytica Inc. or a related name.
• Whether the company confirms a single headquarters city, given the conflicting claims from Crunchbase, Extruct and the company's own site.
• Whether the industrial protein platform, Amina, and the biosecurity diagnostics pitch are run as one product line or the company has fully moved on from the earlier business.

In their words

Related companies

• Digistain: Also in Diagnostics. A mid-infrared scan of an unstained tumour slice, converted into a recurrence risk score in about an hour
• Correlia Biosystems: Also in Diagnostics. A UC Berkeley spinout that stopped waiting for proteins to drift toward an antibody and started pushing them there with an electric field
• Cambridge Cancer Genomics: Also in Diagnostics. A Y Combinator backed British company that used repeat blood draws and machine learning to tell an oncologist when a cancer drug had stopped working
• PreDxion Bio: Also in Diagnostics. A University of Michigan spinout that built a thirty minute cytokine test for the intensive care unit, turned it toward COVID-19 in April 2020, then turned again toward

Sources

1. Public recordAMINOANALYTICA LTD company overview, filing history and officers, company number 15635749Companies House, GOV.UK · accessed Sep 25, 2026
2. Public recordPubMed listing, PMID 42424392, Mind the gap: An embedding guide to safely travel in sequence spacePLoS Computational Biology · Jul 2026
3. Public recordPubMed listing, PMID 41337470, BAGEL: Protein engineering via exploration of an energy landscapePLoS Computational Biology · Dec 2025
4. IndependentStart-up insights: AminoAnalyticaImperial Materials blog, Kayleigh Brewer · Mar 20, 2024
5. IndependentAminoAnalytica company profileTracxn · accessed Sep 25, 2026
6. IndependentAminoAnalytica funding and company profileExtruct · accessed Sep 25, 2026
7. IndependentAminoAnalytica organization profileCrunchbase, archived copy · Jul 2024
8. IndependentContracts Finder search results for AminoAnalyticaGOV.UK Contracts Finder · accessed Sep 25, 2026
9. CompanyAminoAnalytica company pageY Combinator · accessed Sep 25, 2026
10. CompanyLaunch YC: AminoAnalytica, next generation proteins engineered with protein language modelsY Combinator · 2024
11. CompanyLaunch YC: Amina, The Agentic Protein EngineerY Combinator
12. CompanyAminoAnalytica homepageaminoanalytica.com · accessed Sep 25, 2026