Biotechnology · Drug discovery platform

General Proximity

A San Francisco biotech built on one idea: most disease driving proteins can be controlled, not just blocked, given the right partner protein. The company calls its platform OmniTAC and has spent six years, and $16 million to $28 million by its own shifting count, trying to prove it.

A white whale he will not name

Armand Cognetta has one drug target he calls his white whale, so important, he says, that it would be worth spending an entire life on. He will not name it. In a 2026 interview he described it only in outline: a first trial for a target that, with the same drug, could later expand into an aging indication, one he says would matter for every human alive.

That is the pitch in miniature: an unnamed hard target, a platform its founder says can reach it, and a founder saying some version of this since 2019, mostly alone.

The problem: undruggable does not mean untouchable

Most small molecule drugs work by binding a pocket on a target protein and jamming it, which works for maybe a fifth of human proteins. The rest, transcription factors, scaffolding proteins, anything without a clean pocket, have long been written off as undruggable.

PROTACs, the proximity technology that came before General Proximity, cracked part of that problem: a molecule links a disease protein to an E3 ubiquitin ligase, the cell’s own tagging enzyme, and the cell destroys the target. Cognetta does not dispute the achievement. “They’re the only clinical modality that lets you systemically control the abundance of a protein in a human,” he said in 2026. But a PROTAC can only destroy. The bet is that the same trick, forcing two proteins together, can also activate, refold, relocalize or reprogram a target, if you know which of thousands of partner proteins to use. That pool is what the company calls the effectome, roughly ten percent of the genome, made of chaperones, adaptor proteins, trafficking proteins and enzymes that write, read and erase post translational marks.

A solo founder, a personal reason, a bad pandemic to start in

Cognetta grew up in northern Florida, flunked classes badly enough to take a year off college, and landed an internship at Alnylam Pharmaceuticals that turned him toward science. He earned a PhD in chemical biology at Scripps Research under Benjamin Cravatt, co-authoring 19 papers in journals including Cell, Nature and Science, and contributing IP later folded into Abide Therapeutics, acquired by Lundbeck, and Vividion Therapeutics, acquired by Bayer. In the Cravatt lab he also helped investigate the 2016 Bial clinical trial disaster, in which a participant died; the work traced the drug’s toxicity to unintended brain binding, later presented to the FDA.

He founded General Proximity himself, without a co-founder, incorporating the company in late 2019 as the pandemic began. “I was planning to spend another five or ten years in industry before starting a company,” he said in 2026. “But I just... knew.” The company’s team page also credits him with a stint at the Flagship Pioneering startup Inzen Therapeutics, now Sonata, before he went through Y Combinator to build General Proximity full time. He has described stretching runway three months at a time and once raising $25,000 against a $2 million demo day target. PitchBook records an early accelerator and seed tranche of $150,000 each in early 2020, consistent with a YC batch that winter.

From stealth to a pharma deal

General Proximity stayed quiet for five years, then came out of stealth on January 3, 2025, announcing $16 million raised: an $8 million seed led by Aydin Senkut of Felicis, on top of a pre-seed led by Y Combinator and Jim Dahl of Rock Creek. “It was clear from our first meeting with Armand that General Proximity is going to be one of the technologies that propels us towards cures for cancer and many other diseases,” Senkut said. Investors named across coverage include age1, Modi Ventures, Wilson Sonsini, and backers such as Google’s Jeff Dean and Anthropic co-founder Ben Mann.

Government money arrived alongside the venture money. In October 2024, ARPA-H named General Proximity one of 24 awardees in its Sprint for Women’s Health, describing a company in San Francisco aiming “to create a therapeutic to an undruggable target, which may be able to target multiple cancers in women.” The company puts the award at $3 million; ARPA-H gives only a $110 million total across all 24 teams. The company also says it won a $400,000 NIH NCI SBIR grant in February 2024 for triple negative breast cancer work.

By November 2025 the platform had its first named pharma partner: a multi-target oncology collaboration with Daiichi Sankyo, run through Daiichi’s Boston research institute. “Daiichi Sankyo is a leader in oncology research and development, and we are excited to work with such a strong collaborator,” Cognetta said. Pharmaceutical Technology covered the deal independently. Six months later, FreeMind Investments and Daewoong Pharmaceutical invested, with Daewoong’s CEO telling Korea Biomedical Review the technology “holds strong strategic value.” That May 2026 release said the company had “raised over $20 million” to date, oddly next to Cognetta’s own March 2026 announcement of a $12 million pre-Series A, which added to January 2025’s total puts fundraising closer to $28 million.

What is proven, and what is still claimed

Read plainly: General Proximity has checkable footing in two places, a federal grant program that names it, and a pharma partner in Daiichi Sankyo. Everything else, the dollar totals, grant sizes, patent estate, Golden Tickets, rests on the company’s own account, which does not fully add up.

What to watch

• Whether General Proximity files a Form D for the $12 million pre-Series A, due within 15 days of the first sale.
• Whether the company reconciles $16 million plus $12 million with the “over $20 million” figure from May 2026.
• Whatever Cognetta’s “white whale” turns out to be, and whether an IND filing follows the lead work he described in 2025.
• Disclosed milestones from Daiichi Sankyo, and whether Daewoong converts its investment into the collaboration both companies described in May 2026.

In their words

General Proximity funding profile on HVCFHealthcare Venture Capital Fund

Related companies

• Algen Biotechnologies: Also in Drug Discovery and Delivery. A CRISPR and machine learning platform for choosing drug targets, spun out of Jennifer Doudna’s Berkeley lab in 2018
• Talus Bio: Also in Drug Discovery and Delivery. A Seattle company that strips a living human cell down to the proteins still gripping DNA, measures all of them at once by mass spectrometry, and uses the result to hunt
• Ditto Biosciences: Also in Drug Discovery and Delivery. A three person company mining the genomes of viruses, ticks and worms for proteins that already know how to calm the human immune system
• Diffuse Bio: Also in Drug Discovery and Delivery. A Y Combinator company founded by one of the researchers who first pointed diffusion models at proteins

Sources

1. Public recordARPA-H Sprint for Women’s Health awardee listARPA-H · Oct 23, 2024
2. Public recordForm D/A, General Proximity, a Series of VUVP Fund LLCSEC EDGAR · Apr 22, 2026
3. IndependentGeneral Proximity emerges to advance ‘proximity medicines’ for longevity and moreLongevity.Technology, Danny Sullivan · Jan 6, 2025
4. InterviewInside the startup giving small molecules superpowersLEVITY, Peter Ottsjö · Mar 11, 2026
5. IndependentGeneral Proximity and Daiichi Sankyo collaborate on oncologyPharmaceutical Technology, Salong Debbarma · Nov 14, 2025
6. IndependentDaewoong, FMI invest in General Proximity to advance induced-proximity drugsKorea Biomedical Review, Lee Han-soo · Apr 30, 2026
7. CompanyGeneral Proximity De-Stealths with $16M to Pioneer Next-Gen Induced Proximity Medicines for Undruggable TargetsPR Newswire · Jan 3, 2025
8. CompanyGeneral Proximity Announces Multi-Target Collaboration with Daiichi SankyoPR Newswire · Nov 12, 2025
9. CompanyFreeMind Investments and Daewoong Pharmaceutical Co., Ltd. Invest in General ProximityPR Newswire · May 4, 2026