Jan 8, 2026 · 47 min · 11 segments
Cofounders Jeremy Wohlwend and Gabriele Corso join the a16z podcast to discuss the launch of Boltz, a public benefit company building AI infrastructure for molecular biology. The conversation explains…
Jeremy WohlwendGuest
Gabriele CorsoGuest
Jorge CondeHostZach DorickHostOne thing that really struck us when we started learning about Bolts while I was still on the academic side is just how many collaborators you guys were able to assemble around the Bolts project.
We all know that convincing talented grad students to work on your project instead of their own is an incredibly difficult task.
And so how are you able to sort of set the vision that so many other exceptional people were excited to follow?
So we really started working on the Boltz model soon after AlphaFold3 was published.
On the one hand, on the positive side, because it set a new standard in terms of the performance of our ability to model biomolecular interactions.
On the other hand, it was really the first time that really the state of the art was no longer accessible by most people in the And so Jeremy, I, and Saro started working together around this time on Bolt.
And, you know, Bolt's one, we came together to create Bolt's one, which was the first fully accessible open source model to approach half a volt free level of accuracy.
And also at MIT and beyond, we started, you know, working with a lot of people that, you know, joined the project, both, you know, directly as well as, you know, indirectly for the community and started contributing to the models and to the tools.
that we did that I think were critical in sort of building out the momentum around the models and around the community.
The second one was, I think, you know, our effort towards like making engineering quality and sort of like ease of use really central.
It's another to like do it in a way that is going to be really easy for people to like hop on and do interesting work.
And I think, you know, the third one was sort of on like community building.
I think like that sort of contributed to you know, the, the community really building up, up to a point where like, you know, to be honest, like even this like Slack community of like a few thousand people is like largely self-sustained now where like I, you know, we, we don't necessarily answer a lot of questions on there anymore.
It's like very much like people, you know, answering each other's question.
One thing that really struck us when we started learning about Bolts while I was still on the academic side is just how many collaborators you guys were able to assemble around the Bolts project.
We all know that convincing talented grad students to work on your project instead of their own is an incredibly difficult task.
And so how are you able to sort of set the vision that so many other exceptional people were excited to follow?
So we really started working on the Boltz model soon after AlphaFold3 was published.
On the one hand, on the positive side, because it set a new standard in terms of the performance of our ability to model biomolecular interactions.
On the other hand, it was really the first time that really the state of the art was no longer accessible by most people in the And so Jeremy, I, and Saro started working together around this time on Bolt.
And, you know, Bolt's one, we came together to create Bolt's one, which was the first fully accessible open source model to approach half a volt free level of accuracy.
And also at MIT and beyond, we started, you know, working with a lot of people that, you know, joined the project, both, you know, directly as well as, you know, indirectly for the community and started contributing to the models and to the tools.
that we did that I think were critical in sort of building out the momentum around the models and around the community.
The second one was, I think, you know, our effort towards like making engineering quality and sort of like ease of use really central.
It's another to like do it in a way that is going to be really easy for people to like hop on and do interesting work.
And I think, you know, the third one was sort of on like community building.
I think like that sort of contributed to you know, the, the community really building up, up to a point where like, you know, to be honest, like even this like Slack community of like a few thousand people is like largely self-sustained now where like I, you know, we, we don't necessarily answer a lot of questions on there anymore.
It's like very much like people, you know, answering each other's question.
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