Converge Bio

Congrats to the brilliant Converge Bio team led by Iddo Weiner, Dov Gertz, and Oded Kalev! Read Devin Coldewey's excellent explanation of their technology and you'll understand why I'm so gung ho about this company!

???????? Converge Bio ???? ?? ????????? ????? ????? ?????? ??????? ???????? GenAI ????? Seed ?????? TLV Partners Dov Gertz | Oded Kalev | Iddo Weiner | Shahar Tzafrir | Dana Harel Tayer | Naama Duvdevani | Ronny Hassid

?? We're excited to welcome Converge Bio to the TLV Partners family! Today, Converge Bio announced its $5.5M Seed round, led by TLV Partners, to revolutionize drug discovery and development using Generative AI. Their cutting-edge platform leverages LLMs trained on biological and chemical data to help biotech and pharmaceutical companies develop better drugs in less time. ?? Why does this matter? Bringing a new drug to market can take over 10 years and cost more than $1 billion, with 90% of candidates failing during clinical trials. Converge Bio is changing the game by treating biological data like a language, making it faster, more precise, and more reliable to design new medications and biological products. With partnerships including Teva Pharmaceuticals, Compugen, and BiomX Inc, Converge Bio’s platform is already proving its ability to accelerate discovery and generate optimized biological products like mRNA vaccines and engineered antibodies. As Shahar Tzafrir, Managing Partner at TLV Partners, puts it: "Converge Bio isn’t just advancing drug discovery; they’re reshaping how we understand, explain, and manipulate biology itself. The concept of treating biological data as a language is transformative, and we couldn’t be more excited to support their journey." To the incredible founding team—Dov Gertz, Oded Kalev and Iddo Weiner—welcome aboard! We’re proud to partner with you as you lead the next era of biotech innovation. ??? Read more on TechCrunch: https://lnkd.in/daa3GArp

Big congrats Iddo Weiner and the Converge Bio team!!! ????????????

?? We're excited to welcome Converge Bio to the TLV Partners family! Today, Converge Bio announced its $5.5M Seed round, led by TLV Partners, to revolutionize drug discovery and development using Generative AI. Their cutting-edge platform leverages LLMs trained on biological and chemical data to help biotech and pharmaceutical companies develop better drugs in less time. ?? Why does this matter? Bringing a new drug to market can take over 10 years and cost more than $1 billion, with 90% of candidates failing during clinical trials. Converge Bio is changing the game by treating biological data like a language, making it faster, more precise, and more reliable to design new medications and biological products. With partnerships including Teva Pharmaceuticals, Compugen, and BiomX Inc, Converge Bio’s platform is already proving its ability to accelerate discovery and generate optimized biological products like mRNA vaccines and engineered antibodies. As Shahar Tzafrir, Managing Partner at TLV Partners, puts it: "Converge Bio isn’t just advancing drug discovery; they’re reshaping how we understand, explain, and manipulate biology itself. The concept of treating biological data as a language is transformative, and we couldn’t be more excited to support their journey." To the incredible founding team—Dov Gertz, Oded Kalev and Iddo Weiner—welcome aboard! We’re proud to partner with you as you lead the next era of biotech innovation. ??? Read more on TechCrunch: https://lnkd.in/daa3GArp

?? We're excited to welcome Converge Bio to the TLV Partners family! Today, Converge Bio announced its $5.5M Seed round, led by TLV Partners, to revolutionize drug discovery and development using Generative AI. Their cutting-edge platform leverages LLMs trained on biological and chemical data to help biotech and pharmaceutical companies develop better drugs in less time. ?? Why does this matter? Bringing a new drug to market can take over 10 years and cost more than $1 billion, with 90% of candidates failing during clinical trials. Converge Bio is changing the game by treating biological data like a language, making it faster, more precise, and more reliable to design new medications and biological products. With partnerships including Teva Pharmaceuticals, Compugen, and BiomX Inc, Converge Bio’s platform is already proving its ability to accelerate discovery and generate optimized biological products like mRNA vaccines and engineered antibodies. As Shahar Tzafrir, Managing Partner at TLV Partners, puts it: "Converge Bio isn’t just advancing drug discovery; they’re reshaping how we understand, explain, and manipulate biology itself. The concept of treating biological data as a language is transformative, and we couldn’t be more excited to support their journey." To the incredible founding team—Dov Gertz, Oded Kalev and Iddo Weiner—welcome aboard! We’re proud to partner with you as you lead the next era of biotech innovation. ??? Read more on TechCrunch: https://lnkd.in/daa3GArp

I'm thrilled to announce Converge Bio’s $5.5m seed round led by TLV Partners! The events that led to this moment started to unfold over ten years ago when I met my good friend Iddo Weiner during reserve duty. He exposed me to the field of computational biology years ago and more recently introduced me to Dov Gertz, my friend, partner and the CEO of Converge Bio . He also joined us as the chief scientific officer. It feels like not so long ago I was sitting alone during COVID lockdown and experimenting with transformer models trained on COVID RNA data and now I have with me the best partners one can ask, and an amazing team. Together we are working on cutting edge scientific and technical challenges with the potential to really change the world and affect all of us. So many contributed to our journey, each in their own way, and I can't thank them enough. . my deepest gratitude to Shahar Tzafrir, TLV Partners and our amazing group of angel investors for their trust. Stay tuned because this is just the start https://lnkd.in/dasXhtv9

Converge Bio raises $5.5M in Seed funding to speed up drug discovery and development with GenAI. The Israeli startup's platform uses large language models (LLMs) trained on biological and chemical data (DNA, RNA, protein sequences, and small molecules) to help biotech and pharmaceutical companies discover and develop better-performing drugs in less time.

I am thrilled to announce Converge Bio's $5.5M seed round led by TLV Partners! We are living through a special period of history in which advanced AI is exponentially improving its understanding of DNA, RNA, protein sequences, and chemical compounds. When we look back a few years from now at the Generative AI revolution, the technological leaps we’re seeing with ChatGPT will be dwarfed by GenAI's impact on the ability to comprehend the fabric of life and help engineer complex biological products. At Converge Bio, we are building the GenAI hub for the entire biotech and pharma industry. Our platform offers Generative AI-based solutions for the discovery and development of better biological products, including medications, vaccines, diagnostic methods, and food.? ? Our incredible, growing team is stretching the limits of science in training biological foundational models and harnessing these models across different disciplines in biological R&D. I am so happy to have Shahar Tzafrir, the entire TLV Partners team, and our incredible angel investors join us on our ambitious journey. I couldn't have asked for better investors to support us in realizing our vision! To my unbelievably talented partners, Oded Kalev and Iddo Weiner - you guys are the absolute best partners I could wish for. I can't wait for our journey ahead. To our customers and collaborators, those that we can mention and those that we can't, it's been a pleasure working with you all, and we look forward to stretching the limits of science to improve your R&D efforts. https://lnkd.in/dnJkRGUn

I’m excited to share that?Converge Bio?has successfully raised?$5.5 million?in seed funding! First, a few heartfelt thank-yous: *To my incredible colleagues and good friends,?Oded Kalev?and?Dov Gertz, who turned this "crazy" idea into a real, tangible company. *To?TLV Partners?and our amazing angel investors who believe in our vision and have supported us wholeheartedly. *To our superstar team—your energy, professionalism, and dedication inspire me every single day; Noam Shahar Naama Duvdevani Daniel Roich Etay Todress Noam Azoulay Danielle Miller Yahel Yedidya Yuval Talmor Eli Weber Michael Gordon Eyal Solomon Shachar Barak This moment is also deeply personal for me, and I’d like to share why. Over the past decade, I’ve worked at the intersection of?machine learning and biology, using algorithms to tackle some of biology’s most complex challenges. While experimenting with machine learning in other domains—like handwriting recognition or image classification—I had access to datasets with hundreds of thousands of labeled data points. The algorithms worked beautifully, and tweaking them for biology was fun. But when it came time to apply these tools to?biological data, the landscape changed. High-quality labeled datasets in biology were painfully scarce—often fewer than 100 data points for the entire field. Despite biologists’ hard work in building these datasets, their size and scale made it nearly impossible to apply standard machine learning tools effectively. And then, along came?LLMs (large language models)—a game changer for biology. LLMs introduced two revolutionary features: Pre-training without labeled data: Suddenly, we could leverage the vast, previously "unusable" reservoirs of unlabeled biological data (e.g., DNA or protein sequences). For computational biologists, this was transformative—what was once a limitation became a treasure trove. Transfer learning: Even if we have limited labeled data for a specific task, we can now combine logically similar datasets to boost training and performance. LLMs are designed to make this process seamless. At?Converge Bio, we’re harnessing these breakthroughs to tackle problems that were once considered insurmountable. We’re transforming vast, untapped biological datasets into actionable insights, driving innovations in drug development, and laying the foundation for a new era in life sciences. This $5.5M seed funding isn’t just about resources—it’s a validation of our vision, our approach, and the incredible people making it all happen. Together, we’re building the bridge between biology and AI, with the potential to change lives. Here’s to a future where groundbreaking science becomes reality. Let’s get to work! https://lnkd.in/dwm5Nnca