David van Dijk is Co-Founder and CEO of CellType (YC W26), the agentic drug company building foundation models and AI agents that simulate human biology to accelerate drug discovery.

David earned his PhD in Computer Science from the University of Amsterdam and the Weizmann Institute of Science, completed postdoctoral fellowships at Columbia University and Yale, and in 2019 established a biomedical machine learning lab at Yale spanning the Departments of Internal Medicine and Computer Science.

A Yale Associate Professor with over 11,000 citations, David has published in Cell, Nature, ICML, and NeurIPS, co-developed the Cell2Sentence (C2S) technology with Google DeepMind, and famously turned down Google to build CellType.

David is the recipient of multiple prestigious awards including the NIH R35 MIRA Award, NSF CAREER Award, Dutch Research Council Rubicon Fellowship, and the Colton and Roberts Innovation Awards.

CellType's core technology, developed with Google DeepMind, screened over 4,000 drugs and validated a novel cancer treatment signal in human tumor microenvironments, earning recognition from Google CEO Sundar Pichai and inbound partnerships with Top 10 pharma companies.