About
We built Fermvyne because protein engineers deserve better tools.
We spent years running enzyme engineering campaigns at synthetic biology companies around Research Triangle Park. Watched wet lab cycles eat months on variants that a reaction-aware model could have eliminated in hours — if anyone had built one. We built it.
"Directed evolution works. The problem is spending 8 weeks screening a 200-variant library when a model trained on reaction chemistry could have told you which 18 to order. We built the model."
Fermvyne — Research Triangle Park, NC — Founded 2024
Team
Three people, one focus
Catalina Bravo
CEO & Co-Founder
Computational protein engineer with 8 years in industrial synthetic biology. Previously led enzyme design campaigns at a North Carolina biomanufacturing startup, where she watched directed evolution libraries hit 10–15% wet-lab activity rates while the sequences that actually worked were buried in the unordered portion. That observation drove Fermvyne.
Marcus Chen
CTO & Co-Founder
Deep learning engineer focused on biological sequence modeling. Designed and trained the reaction-conditioned transformer architecture at Fermvyne — including the cross-attention bridge that routes EC and SMILES context into the sequence decoder. Previously built structure prediction pipelines at a Durham-based genomics company. M.S. in Computer Science from NC State.
Priya Mehta
Head of Science
Ph.D. Biochemistry, Duke University. Five years of directed evolution across academic and CRO settings, including error-prone PCR library screening and DSF-based thermostability validation. Runs the wet-lab program that measures Fermvyne's Tm predictions against experimental melting curves — and is the person who writes the limitations section when the model falls short.
Built in the heart of North America's biotech corridor
Research Triangle Park sits within reach of NC State's Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, Duke's biochemistry program, and UNC's Eshelman School of Pharmacy. That proximity matters when your Head of Science is validating predictions against DSF data and needs to benchmark against what the surrounding labs are actually doing in directed evolution and industrial biotech.
Fermvyne, Inc. 800 Park Offices Drive, Suite 300 Research Triangle Park, NC 27709 [email protected] +1 (919) 307-0183Try the platform or write to us.
Free tier available. We read every email from protein engineers.