The Startup That Took on DeepMind and Won the Attention of Silicon Valley

Ligo Biosciences co-founders. Edward Harris, Emily Egerton-Warburton, Arda Goreci

They dropped out of Oxford, got into Y Combinator, and now they’re building an AI tool that could reshape the enzyme industry.

Ligo Biosciences is a startup building generative deep learning models to design enzymes - nature’s powerful catalysts that make chemical reactions faster, cheaper, and more sustainable. Ligo’s mission is to design new enzymes to expand their use throughout the chemical industry. 

Ligo’s origin story begins not in a laboratory, but at a pub in Oxford. It was 2021, AlphaFold 2 had just launched, and the buzz around deep learning in biology was palpable. Ed, Emily and Arda, Ligo’s co-founders, began bouncing ideas. Where could AI and biology collide in a way that mattered?

Therapeutics seemed promising but slow. “We didn’t want to wait ten years for regulatory approval,” says Ed “We wanted to build something people could use now.”

That “something” became enzyme design harnessing the power of AI. If successful, Ligo could help reimagine how we make everything from skincare products to textiles. While chemists have begun to harness enzymes, especially in pharmaceuticals, designing them for specific purposes remains slow, expensive, and unpredictable.

Currently, most enzymes are engineered using “directed evolution,” a Nobel Prize-winning but labor-intensive method that mimics natural selection in the lab. It involves mutating DNA sequences, testing thousands of variants, and gradually refining the results. The process can take months and cost millions.

Ligo wants to change that. “AI lets us skip the guesswork,” Ed says. Instead of random mutations, their models should be able to simulate, predict, and design enzyme structures.

Ligo’s breakout moment didn’t come from a product launch, it came from a stand on open science. When DeepMind released AlphaFold3 without sharing the source code in Nature, Ligo took matters into their own hands. They rebuilt the model and published it openly online. In this time they also found errors that prevented reproducibility and were quick to connect with the scientific community over the fact that this was the reason it is so important to publish the code. 

The move sparked a wave of support from the scientific community, drew investor attention, and went viral. 

“It showed we had the technical capabilities,” said the Ligo duo.

The scientific community took notice and their release went viral.

“Our Twitter posts really resonated with some of the scientists in the field and investors picked up on that.”

Ed suggested applying to Y Combinator (YC) with the hope that it would be a way to get feedback. They applied just weeks later and were shocked to land an interview given YC’s ~2% acceptance rate. The team prepared obsessively, but the interview, led by group partner Surbhi, was unexpectedly intense. She grilled them on their readiness to drop out and commit fully. “We thought it was over,” Ed recalls. 

Hours later, a call came at midnight, YC wanted them in. 

Joining YC in 2024, Ligo have raised a significant seed round.

“We closed the initial round in six hours,” Ed says. The valuation was multiple times higher than what they were offered in the UK. The figure of this raise is set to be released soon.

The team noted that the cultural contrast was stark.

“Investors [in the US] have a lot more risk capital… they want to bet big and think on things that could be huge but have a high chance of failure,” Ed said. “In Europe… they don't believe in young people as much.”

For all their technical ambition, Ligo’s mission remains grounded in tangible impact. Industrial chemistry still relies on dirty, resource-heavy methods. Enzymes offer a cleaner alternative as they can work under mild conditions, reduce energy use, eliminate toxic inputs, and minimise waste.

“Enzymes already outperform traditional catalysts in many cases,” says Ed. “But they’re hard to design. That’s the bottleneck we’re solving.”

As generative AI transforms fields from art to law, Ligo’s founders are focused on physical outcomes.

That’s the future Ligo is building toward, one where AI is not just a tool for thought, but a co-creator in shaping the material world. 

Listen to the full story of Ligo Biosciences here:

https://www.sustainabletimes.co.uk/podcast/episode/3bbf33ec/ep11-arda-goreci-edward-harris-ligo-biosciences