Biotechnology & AI drug discovery · Gene therapy design platform
Exonic
A three person San Francisco startup built on a bet that biological AI models trained on messy, unstructured data can be combined on an open, no code platform and turn drug discovery into a public tournament. Its first public result is an AI designed gene therapy enhancer for liver cancer, tested in its own lab. Almost everything else about the company comes from directory listings rather than primary records.
A benchmark, beaten in house
Exonic’s public pitch starts with a single technical claim. “Using Exonic Studio, we just beat a state-of-the-art benchmark in liver cancer (HepG2) synthetic enhancer design, validated in our wet lab,” the company wrote in a 2025 funding profile hosted by the aggregator Investing Lists. “The platform just went live - you can start right now.”
No paper, preprint or conference abstract describing that result turned up in PubMed or bioRxiv searches carried out for this profile as of September 2026. The claim exists, for now, only where Exonic has chosen to write it down.
The problem it says it is solving
Exonic frames drug discovery as a computational problem trapped behind closed doors. “Today drug discovery is siloed - secretive, adversarial institutions in glass towers,” the company said in the same funding profile. “Biological AI is changing the rules. Every day drug discovery becomes more of a computational problem. Exonic is turning drug discovery into an open, meritocratic tournament.”
The idea is to do for biology what open source did for AI research: publish the models, let anyone combine them, and validate the best submissions experimentally rather than behind a corporate wall. On Y Combinator’s site the pitch is narrower and more concrete: “We program DNA sequences to be context-aware, unlocking new kinds of genetic therapies.”
Founders
Ben Brimacombe founded Exonic in 2025 and is listed as its CEO by Y Combinator, PitchBook and the founder directory on Extruct AI. He studied computer science and mathematics at Columbia, graduating in 2020, and describes himself on Y Combinator’s site as a published AI researcher who worked on machine learning at Long Run Partners, a New York mortgage bank, and at Numerai, the crowdsourced hedge fund. Before Exonic, he was at Free2Grow, an AI voice company for home services businesses; Free2Grow’s own social media accounts identify him as its chief of science, while Y Combinator’s listing credits him with co-founding Free2Grow and co-leading a $1.4 billion revenue aggregator contract called Turnpoint there.
Mikhail Kulak, who holds a PhD, is listed as Exonic’s chief scientific officer on a RocketReach contact page and on a LinkedIn profile under his name, and as a co-founder in Extruct AI’s directory. One additional source, the aggregator Startup Intros, describes a larger founding team, adding a Columbia professor named Nakul Verma and a lab lead named Shivam Bhardwaj, though its own writeup is inconsistent, naming only Ben Brimacombe as founder in one place and four people in another. Verma is a real, independently verifiable Columbia faculty member and director of its data science master’s program, but nothing on his own Columbia page, or elsewhere, ties him to Exonic. No independent source confirms Verma or Bhardwaj as members of the company, so this profile does not treat that claim as established.
Timeline
Exonic joined Y Combinator’s Fall 2025 batch, its primary partner listed as Pete Koomen. PitchBook separately logs an “accelerator/incubator” financing event dated January 1, 2025, a date that reads more like a placeholder than a real transaction. In its funding profile the company says it is “advised by world leaders in bio AI, including the former Head of AI at Ginkgo Bioworks, and the first author of Evo (cover of Science),” without naming either advisor. By 2026 the company says it had trained a newer model showing, in its words, “unprecedented zero-shot generalization on genomic regulatory expression in hold-out biosample datasets,” again with no publication, benchmark write-up or third party evaluation available to check the claim.
What is proven, and what is still claimed
| Evidence | What the record shows | Source type |
|---|---|---|
| Company filings | SEC EDGAR’s company search turns up no Form D or other filing under the name Exonic in San Francisco. The only close name match is Exonics Therapeutics, Inc., a Delaware company once based in Watertown, Massachusetts, that filed a Form D in 2017 and an amendment in 2018. It made a Duchenne muscular dystrophy gene therapy and has no connection to this company beyond the similar name. | Public record |
| Reported funding | PitchBook and Tracxn both put total funding at $500,000 from a seed round, but they disagree on the close date: Tracxn logs September 29, 2025, PitchBook November 17, 2025. Extruct AI’s headline figure for the same company is $1 million, with no round detail to reconcile it. | Differs across sources |
| Named investors | PitchBook lists three: Y Combinator, Exitfund and Pioneer Fund, none marked as lead. No press release or company statement naming investors was found. | Independent, aggregator |
| HepG2 liver cancer result | Exonic says it beat a state of the art benchmark in liver cancer (HepG2) synthetic enhancer design, validated in its own wet lab. No paper, preprint or conference presentation describing the result was found in PubMed or bioRxiv searches. | Company-stated |
| 2026 model claim | The company says a newer model shows zero-shot generalization on genomic regulatory expression in hold-out biosample data. No benchmark, dataset or third party evaluation has been published. | Company-stated |
| Team | Y Combinator and PitchBook both list a team of three. Only one founder, Ben Brimacombe, appears by name on Y Combinator’s own founder list. A second, Mikhail Kulak, is corroborated as chief scientific officer by RocketReach and a LinkedIn profile. | Independent, aggregator |
| Regulatory and clinical record | No FDA 510(k) or PMA record, no registered clinical trial, and no NIH or NSF award under Exonic’s name turned up in the databases behind this profile. | Not found |
Read plainly, Exonic’s public record is made almost entirely of directory listings rather than primary documents. Its one specific technical claim, the HepG2 benchmark result, has not surfaced anywhere outside the company’s own description, and its total funding is reported differently by every source that reports it.
What to watch
- Whether Exonic publishes the HepG2 liver cancer benchmark result in a peer reviewed paper or preprint.
- A Form D or other SEC filing that would reconcile the $500,000 and $1 million funding figures reported by different aggregators.
- Named advisors, beyond the unnamed “former Head of AI at Ginkgo Bioworks” and “first author of Evo” the company cites.
- Independent confirmation of Nakul Verma and Shivam Bhardwaj as members of the founding team.
- Public use of Exonic Studio by outside researchers or a named pharmaceutical partner.
In their words
“What if you could train a biological foundation model on... the entire internet?”
Exonic company description, Freehire company profile, 2026 · Company-stated
“We program DNA sequences to be context-aware, unlocking new kinds of genetic therapies.”
Exonic, Y Combinator company listing, accessed Sep 2026 · Company-stated
“Exonic is building a global network of intelligence to cure all disease.”
Exonic, funding profile via Investing Lists, Nov 2025 · Company-stated
“Today drug discovery is siloed - secretive, adversarial institutions in glass towers.”
Exonic, funding profile via Investing Lists, Nov 2025 · Company-stated
“We are advised by world leaders in bio AI, including the former Head of AI at Ginkgo Bioworks, and the first author of Evo (cover of Science).”
Exonic, funding profile via Investing Lists, Nov 2025 · Company-stated
“Using Exonic Studio, we just beat a state-of-the-art benchmark in liver cancer (HepG2) synthetic enhancer design, validated in our wet lab.”
Exonic, funding profile via Investing Lists, Nov 2025 · Company-stated
“The platform just went live - you can start right now.”
Exonic, funding profile via Investing Lists, Nov 2025 · Company-stated
Related companies
Sources
- Public recordSEC EDGAR company search for “Exonic” (no Form D found; closest match Exonics Therapeutics, Inc., unrelated)
- IndependentExonic: Unsupervised Biological AI
- IndependentExonic 2026 Company Profile: Valuation, Funding & Investors
- IndependentExonic - 2026 Company Profile, Team, Funding & Competitors
- IndependentExonic Funding: $1M, Complete Analysis
- IndependentMikhail Kulak, Exonic Chief Scientific Officer, contact listing
- IndependentNakul Verma faculty homepage
- IndependentFree2Grow social posts identifying Ben Brimacombe as chief of science
- CompanyExonic: Funding, Team & Investors
- CompanyExonic funding profile and company description
- CompanyExonic company profile
- CompanyExonic homepage, “AI for precision gene therapy”
Profile researched and written by Healthcare Discovery. Last updated September 29, 2026.
