Bio AI Startup Radical Numerics Launches with $50M Seed Round
The startup, which counts Harvard’s George Church as a scientific advisor, will try to build AI models for “general biological intelligence.”
Radical Numerics, a San Francisco-based startup aiming to build artificial intelligence models for “general biological intelligence,” has launched with $50 million in seed funding.
Emergence Capital led the round, joined by Obvious Ventures, Triatomic Capital, Factory, and First Spark Ventures. Pre-seed investors included Patrick Collison, CEO and cofounder of digital payment company Stripe.
Radical Numerics is building multimodal AI models that learn from biological data across DNA, RNA, and proteins, with intended applications in cancer diagnostics, drug target identification, and biosecurity.
“Evo showed that AI can generate DNA and whole genomes, the next generation of models will go further with the ability to control function, and eventually, create entirely new forms of life,” CEO and Cofounder Eric Nguyen said in a statement. “Our multimodal models are already far more capable, and we understand the responsibility that comes with that. The same models that can help cure disease may also lower the barrier to designing harmful biology. These forces are inseparable. Biology will be the most consequential application of AI.”
The company claimed its genomic language model, dubbed Omnii, can identify causal regulatory variants as well as detect AI-generated or AI-manipulated pathogens.
In a statement, the company said it would use the funding to scale its models and hire more people.
Besides Nguyen, the founding team also includes Chief AI Scientist Michael Poli and CTO Armin Thomas. The trio were collaborators with researchers at the Arc Institute on the Evo and Evo 2 genomic models and have experience at Liquid AI, an MIT startup that built models for use in businesses across many industries.
The company’s scientific advisors include Harvard University genomics researcher George Church, Stanford University’s Chris Ré, Microsoft Chief Scientific Officer Eric Horvitz, and biosecurity expert Andrew Weber.
Radical Numerics said it is partnering with an undisclosed cancer diagnostics company on pancreatic cancer and multi-cancer early detection and with an undisclosed national laboratory to develop pathogen detection and characterization capabilities.