In April 2024, three veterans of pandemic-era surveillance walked out of COVID wastewater war rooms and into poultry barns. Not metaphorically. Literally. Barnwell Bio was born in New York City when Michael Rhys, Casey McGinley, and Jake Byrnes took the same metagenomic playbook that warned cities about COVID before hospitals filled and pointed it at a food system bleeding quietly from disease it could not see early enough.
The problem is not subtle. Highly Pathogenic Avian Influenza torched over $14B from the U.S. economy in 2024 and 2025 alone. More than 38.4B egg laying birds vanished in a single year. Producers are boxed in by tightening USDA and US FDA pressure to eliminate routine antibiotics while pathogens move faster, mutate quicker, and hit margins harder. Barnwell Bio does not test birds one by one. It listens to the barn as a system. Floor foot swabs. Fecal matter. The full microbial ecosystem. Bacteria, fungi, parasites, viruses, all sequenced together into a living microbiome fingerprint that shows trouble weeks before feathers hit the floor.
Barnwell Bio locked in $6M in seed funding to scale that intelligence across the U.S. poultry belt. Twelve Below led the round, with backing from Max Ventures, Dorm Room Fund, Banter Capital, Planeteer Capital, Ag Ventures Alliance, Daybreak Ventures, Alumni Ventures, and Ag Launch Farmers. The capital is aimed squarely at expansion across the Midwest and Southeast, deeper AI driven analytics, and building a team that can translate genomic noise into decisions producers can actually act on.
Michael Rhys brings the strategic spine, having helped scale national COVID wastewater monitoring at Biobot Analytics. Casey McGinley brings operational muscle from years of turning complex science into shipped product. Jake Byrnes brings scientific gravity, with decades across population genomics, statistics, and computational biology. Their early team, including Cassie Ettinger, Genevieve Roberts, Max Yuhas, and Gabriel Dell Accio, reads less like a startup roster and more like a quiet strike team built for pattern detection under pressure.
Barnwell Bio is already operating across the poultry belt, working with commercial integrators and research partners, converting barn environments into early warning systems. In a $315B global poultry market where disease arrives faster than diagnoses, foresight is no longer a luxury. It is infrastructure. The barns are already talking. The question is who is listening next.
