Connor Lee
| Connor Lee | |
| Occupation | Entrepreneur, software engineer |
|---|---|
| Known for | Co-founder and CTO of Anthrogen |
| Education | Columbia University (attended) |
Connor Lee is an American entrepreneur and co-founder and chief technology officer (CTO) of Anthrogen, a biotechnology and artificial intelligence startup developing protein foundation models. Anthrogen was part of Y Combinator's Summer 2024 batch and is based in San Francisco.[1]
Early life and education
Lee attended Columbia University's Columbia Engineering, where he studied applied mathematics and robotics. During his time at Columbia, he was a researcher in the university's ROAM Lab and served as the youngest-ever president of the Columbia Robotics club. He was named a Sarah E. Grant Scholar of Columbia University. Lee dropped out of Columbia as a sophomore to co-found Anthrogen.[2]
Prior to his university studies, Lee had over a decade of experience in competitive robotics, placing third internationally in the FIRST Robotics Competition (FRC) and achieving a top-five international finish in the MATE ROV Competition.
Career
Lee co-founded Anthrogen alongside Ankit Singhal and others. As CTO, he oversees the technical development of the company's AI platform. Anthrogen trains large-scale AI foundation models on protein sequences and structures to generate novel proteins and peptides with specified functions. The company's stated goal is to accelerate protein design for applications in therapeutics, sustainable manufacturing, and molecular innovation.[1]
The company developed Odyssey, which it describes as a family of protein language models scaled to 102 billion parameters. Odyssey supports multi-objective design goals and incorporates what the company calls novel architectural frameworks for scaling and generalization. The model's API has been made available in early access.[2]
Anthrogen's team includes scientists from Columbia University, Duke University, and the University of California, Berkeley, including Steven Strutt, who previously worked in the Doudna Lab at UC Berkeley on CRISPR-Cas9 and high-throughput workflows. The company operates at the intersection of artificial intelligence, deep learning, and biotechnology, and employs approximately six people.
Lee was named to the Forbes 30 Under 30 list in the Energy & Green Tech category in 2025.
References
- ↑ 1.0 1.1 "Anthrogen – Y Combinator". 'Y Combinator}'. Retrieved 2026-03-18.
- ↑ 2.0 2.1 "Anthrogen". 'Anthrogen}'. Retrieved 2026-03-18.