b12 Labs YC Application

Summer 2025Active

b12 Labs went through Y Combinator in the Summer 2025 batch as a Healthcare company. Below: what the company does, who founded it, and its application to YC, reconstructed question by question in the real YC form.

YC batch: Summer 2025
Industry: HealthcareDrug Discovery and Delivery
Team size: 2
Status: Active
Launched: 2025

Founders

Zlatko JončevFounder
Andres BranFounder

What b12 Labs does

b12 is an AI copilot that plans how to create and test new molecules for chemists. We're like a GPS for chemistry, helping pharma companies plan the recipes for new drugs, accelerating early-stage drug discovery from years to months. Andres built the first AI agent that can autonomously think and make molecules in a robotic lab, published in Nature Machine Intelligence (750+ citations), and won the best paper award at the NeurIPS AI for Science conference. Zlatko is a 3x National Chemistry Olympiad champion, competed at IChO level, and medicinal chemist who has worked at Roche and leading lab robotics companies. He has an extensive network of hundreds of chemists across Europe. We are publishing a groundbreaking paper in Nature demonstrating our AI's ability to optimally plan chemical recipes. We run paid pilots with big pharma companies showing that our platform planned a set of experiments that achieved full conversion in a single attempt, eliminating the usual 8-12 iteration cycle.

b12 Labs's YC application, reconstructed

Y Combinator application

b12 Labs, Summer 2025 batch. The real form questions, answered from public data.

Founders2
Company7
Progress7
Idea4
Equity3
Curious2
Batch Preference1

Company

Company name

b12 Labs

Describe what your company does in 50 characters or less.

Chemical Copilot for Pharma and Biotech

What is your company going to make? Please describe your product and what it does or will do.

We built an AI copilot that plans how to create and test new molecules for chemists. Our platform designs chemical recipes better and faster than traditional methods, cutting early-stage drug discovery from years to months. Pharma companies use it to plan experiments that our AI can optimize to achieve target molecules in far fewer tries.

Where do you live now, and where would the company be based after YC?

We live in San Francisco, CA, and the company will remain based here after YC.

Explain your decision regarding location.

We live here because it's a hub for both biotech and AI talent and close to pharma partners. Staying here after YC keeps us connected to resources and customers.

21 more answers in the full application

Founders, Progress, Idea, Equity, Curious, Batch Preference are in the full version. Create a free account to open it in YC Insights, next to every other YC batch.

See full application

Frequently Asked Questions

Is this the real b12 Labs YC application?

No. Y Combinator keeps submitted applications private. This is a reconstruction: the real YC form questions, answered from b12 Labs's public data (launch notes, founder backgrounds, product description). It shows how a company like b12 Labs would present itself to YC, not the text they submitted.