Ankit Gupta
General Partner at Y Combinator
Ankit Gupta is a General Partner at Y Combinator, named in September 2025 after working with YC founders as a Visiting Partner. He co-founded Reverie Labs (YC W18), a machine learning drug discovery company, and was its CTO until Ginkgo Bioworks acquired its key assets in February 2024. He then led AI work at Ginkgo. He studied computer science at Harvard.
- Venture capital
- Machine learning
- Drug discovery
Y Combinator
Ginkgo Bioworks
- Now
- General Partner, Y Combinator1
- Co-founded
- Reverie Labs (YC W18)4
- Studied
- Computer science (A.B. and S.M.), Harvard1
- Based
- Cambridge, Massachusetts2
In their words
I am a computer scientist and entrepreneur with 10 years of experience in machine learning and the life sciences. I was previously the co-founder and CTO of Reverie Labs, a small molecule therapeutics company that used machine learning to drive a pipeline of therapeutics in oncology. As a founder, I grew our company to a staff of 30, built a culture of technology and engineering that marries computer science with chemistry, and raised $31M from top investors to fund our internal therapeutics pipeline.
3
Experience
- Head of AI2024 – 2025
Joined through Ginkgo's acquisition of Reverie Labs' assets. Worked on building and commercializing AI foundation models for antibodies, enzymes and mRNA.3
- Co-founder and CTO2017 – 2024
Reverie used machine learning to design brain-penetrant cancer drugs; its lead program was a CDK4/6 inhibitor in IND-enabling studies (the lab work needed before testing in people). He ran its machine learning, data science, software and infrastructure teams, and the company raised $31 million in total.3
- Researcher2017
Deep learning research on computer vision and robotics tasks.3
- Software Engineering32016
- Software Engineering32015
- Researcher2014
Research intern at the Center for Cancer Computational Biology at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, analyzing genomic data.3
- Technology Associate32014
Education
Recognition
Milestones
- Published a paper on quantum automata at the 21st International Workshop on Post-Binary ULSI Systems3
- Earned a joint A.B. and S.M. in computer science from Harvard6
- Presented research on dilated convolutions for genomic modeling at the ICML Workshop on Computational Biology in Sydney8
- Co-founded Reverie Labs, which joined Y Combinator's Winter 2018 batch3
- Reverie Labs raised a $25 million round6
- Named to Forbes 30 Under 30 in Healthcare for 2023, with co-founder Jonah Kallenbach7
- Ginkgo Bioworks acquired Reverie Labs' key assets; he joined Ginkgo to lead its AI work5
- Became a Visiting Partner at Y Combinator3
- Named a General Partner at Y Combinator2