Ligo builds next-gen tooling to manipulate chemistry and biology, starting with enzyme design.

We are betting on two tailwinds.

1. General intelligence is becoming abundant and scalable. LLMs are increasingly able to reason, write code, analyze data, design experiments, interpret results, and operate across scientific domains autonomously.

2. Specialized tools become the bottleneck for scientific progress. Much of science remains inaccessible until the right tools exist; without them, even powerful intelligence has no way to reason about those domains. AlphaFold is the canonical example of this. Protein folding is intractable to general reasoning, for both humans and language models. You cannot simply think your way from sequence to structure. But by training a neural network on the Protein Data Bank, AlphaFold created a computational interface to protein geometry. Once that interface existed, humans and agents could suddenly reason in a domain that had previously been largely inaccessible.

We believe this pattern will repeat across science.

We are starting with enzymes because they combine breakthrough potential with fast experimental feedback. Enzymes are the programmable machinery of biology. Sometimes, one enzyme is enough to revolutionize an entire field of biology. Cas9, an enzyme discovered in bacteria, enabled the CRISPR gene editing revolution. With the right design tools, scientific agents can search enzyme space deliberately — discovering new catalysts, new biological functions, and new ways to intervene in biology.

We are a small team of researchers spanning biology, chemistry, mathematics, and computer science, united by the belief that scientific progress is on the verge of a step change. As intelligence becomes abundant, progress will be shaped by the tools that let agents explore, perturb, and understand the world.