Exonic YC Application

Fall 2025Active

Exonic went through Y Combinator in the Fall 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: Fall 2025
Industry: HealthcareDrug Discovery and Delivery
Team size: 3
Status: Active
Launched: 2025

Founders

Ben BrimacombeFounder

What Exonic does

What if you could train a biological foundation model on... the entire internet? Exonic is pioneering a new generation of biological foundation models, focused on heterogeneous, unstructured, and noisy datasets. Our first application is the design of safer gene therapies. In 2025, we used AI to set a new state of the art in liver cancer targeted gene therapy, validated in vitro in our lab in San Francisco. So far in 2026, we have trained a new model with unprecedented zero-shot generalization on genomic regulatory expression in hold-out biosample datasets. More to be shared soon.

Exonic's YC application, reconstructed

Y Combinator application

Exonic, Fall 2025 batch. The real form questions, answered from public data.

Founders2
Company7
Progress7
Idea4
Equity3
Curious2
Batch Preference1

Company

Company name

Exonic

Describe what your company does in 50 characters or less.

Unsupervised Biological AI

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

We are building biological foundation models trained on unstructured and noisy data, primarily for designing safer gene therapies. Our models improve zero-shot generalization in genomic regulatory expression and have already set a state of the art in liver cancer targeted gene therapy validation in vitro. The product helps researchers design and test gene therapies using AI to handle complex biological data.

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

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

Explain your decision regarding location.

San Francisco is where our lab and founders are located, giving us direct access to experimental validation and biotech talent essential for our work.

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 Exonic YC application?

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