We are excited to announce that LatchBio has acquired TwentyTwo, a YC S25 team building AI infrastructure for biosecurity.
As AI makes biology easier to engineer, the safeguards around these models stop being an afterthought and become core infrastructure. Security has to improve as fast as capabilities to allow science to progress.
Within our lifetimes, AI will put the ability to engineer a pandemic within reach of a single bad actor. What once took a nation-state and years of work is collapsing toward an undergraduate and a few weeks in the lab. That world is arriving faster than most AI labs are prepared for.
However, in the right hands, these models will accelerate science at a pace never seen before. Scientists will use these models to cure diseases that families have fought for generations and catch outbreaks before they spread. We cannot wall them off from the tools that augment their work.
The problem is that the line between the two is hard to draw. Studying SARS-CoV-2 or Ebola to prepare for the next pandemic is very similar to what a bad actor would do to cause one.
TwentyTwo builds intelligence defense systems that distinguish this line and apply safeguards or grant capabilities accordingly.
Harmon Bhasin, Evan Seeyave, and John Wang are exceptional researchers who care deeply about building the future of life sciences responsibly. The three of them will join Latch as Members of Technical Staff and lead Latch Biosecurity. I am grateful to be working with them.
Expect many more announcements from them over the coming days.
We are hiring biosecurity engineers. If this is the kind of work you want to do, reach out.
