Rahul Vijayan
| Rahul Vijayan | |
| Occupation | Co-founder and CTO of Convexia |
|---|---|
| Known for | Convexia, AI-driven pharmaceutical company |
Rahul Vijayan is an Indian-American entrepreneur and technologist who is the co-founder and chief technology officer (CTO) of Convexia, a pharmaceutical company that describes itself as "AI-maximalist," using artificial intelligence agents to discover, evaluate, and develop drug assets. Convexia is a participant in Y Combinator's Summer 2025 batch and is based in San Francisco, California.[1]
Career
Convexia operates as an end-to-end AI platform designed to replace much of the manual diligence process in pharmaceutical drug development. The company's stated goal is to use autonomous AI agents to buy overlooked drug assets, run clinical trials, and sell them for profit, claiming to operate at speeds ten times faster and with twenty times less overhead than traditional pharmaceutical companies.[2]
The platform is organized around a series of specialized agents and review steps. A Sourcing Agent mines public and private databases as well as unstructured global data to identify overlooked preclinical drug candidates, including abandoned pharmaceutical intellectual property. A Scientific Agent runs computational biology models — including ESM-3, RFdiffusion, Boltz-2, and AlphaFold — to assess drug safety and efficacy through in silico simulations covering binding affinity, toxicity, ADME/PK properties, immunogenicity, and mechanistic fit. A Commercial Agent analyzes FDA incentives, pricing dynamics, total addressable market, competitive landscape, and payer alignment. A Clinical Agent conducts digital twin simulations, evaluates contract research organization (CRO) and chemistry, manufacturing, and controls (CMC) risk, and builds trial plans through Phase 1. A Probability of Success Agent evaluates critical factors impacting clinical trial outcomes, benchmarking against historical analog deals. Each stage incorporates human expert review, including PhD-level scientific validation and a final roundtable with key opinion leaders.[3]
According to Y Combinator's company profile, Convexia was built by two Stanford University computer science students who had previously built three startups together. Vijayan serves as co-founder and CTO alongside co-founder Ayaan Parikh.[4]
In July 2025, Convexia's official debut was covered by The American Bazaar, which described the company as an "AI-maximalist pharma company" using autonomous agents to discover, evaluate, and develop overlooked drug assets.
References
- ↑ "Convexia – Y Combinator". 'Y Combinator}'. Retrieved 2026-03-19.
- ↑ "How Convexia Works". 'Convexia}'. Retrieved 2026-03-19.
- ↑ "How Convexia Works". 'Convexia}'. Retrieved 2026-03-19.
- ↑ "Convexia – Y Combinator". 'Y Combinator}'. Retrieved 2026-03-19.