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CellType

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The agentic drug company. We simulate human biology.

Winter 2026Founded 20252 peopleNew York City, NY, USA
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AI insightcan contain mistakes
AI-Driven Drug DiscoveryServicesPharmaceutical companies and biotech firmsMedium competition
Moat
Proprietary biological foundation models developed with Google DeepMind; agentic drug discovery pipeline.
Key risk
Early stage; regulatory approval timelines; pharma incumbent competition; unproven effectiveness at scale.
Why now
AI foundation models reaching capability for protein/biology simulation; pharma under pressure to accelerate discovery.
Competitors
DeepMind, Isomorphic Labs, Schrödinger, traditional pharma, biotech AI startups
↻ Pivot / rename signal

This company has previously operated under Contextual Bio. A rename frequently marks a pivot in positioning or product — useful raw material for variant ideas.

About

CellType is building an agentic drug company. AI agents that run the full drug discovery pipeline on top of biological foundation models that simulate human biology. Our core technology, developed with Google DeepMind, has already discovered and validated a new cancer treatment signal. We’re working with Top 10 pharma.

Founders · 2

David van Dijk
David van DijkCo-Founder & CEO
GoogleYale

Co-Founder & CEO of CellType (W26). Yale Professor, 11,000+ citations. Built biological foundation models with Google. Building the agentic drug company.

Ivan Vrkic
Ivan VrkicCo-Founder
Yale

Co-Founder @ CellType (W26). ML @ Yale & EPFL. Building the next-generation agentic drug company. Co-developed our core technology Cell2Sentence at Yale and published at ICML. Previously led large-scale foundation model training at a biotech startup and built software to control CERN's Large Hadron Collider.

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