AI

Radical Numerics launches with $50M to build general biological intelligence

Radical Numerics Inc., an artificial intelligence research lab building what it calls general biological intelligence, launched today with $50 million in funding to scale up its models and hire frontier AI talent.

The company is the work of the team behind generative genomics, the field built around Evo, the first AI model able to read and write DNA at scale and the largest fully open-source AI project in any domain. Evo and its successor Evo 2 made the cover of Science and Nature and external scientists later used the model to generate the first complete AI-designed genome, a bacteriophage that infects bacteria and is harmless to humans.

Radical Numerics is building a class of models that learn directly from biological data across DNA, RNA, proteins and beyond, folding the separate strands of biology into a single system. The company argues that multimodal models reasoning across every dimension of biology at once can open paths to cancer diagnostics, drug target identification and biosecurity that single-modality models cannot reach.

Alongside the launch, the company previewed Omnii, its next-generation genomic language model. Radical Numerics says early results show Omnii setting a new state of the art in identifying causal regulatory variants and transferring zero-shot to experimental settings. Without specific training, the model recovers experimentally validated functional variants at genetic locations tied to Alzheimer’s disease and it also leads on detecting AI-generated or AI-manipulated pathogens.

That second capability points to the company’s dual mandate: advancing biological design for human health while building the defenses to protect it. Radical Numerics is working with a cancer diagnostics company on pancreatic and multi-cancer detection and with a national lab to detect and characterize pathogens, whether they occur naturally or are engineered by AI.

“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,” said Eric Nguyen, chief executive of Radical Numerics, in the company’s announcement. “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.”

Nguyen founded the company with Chief AI Scientist Michael Poli, President Stefano Massaroli and Chief Technology Officer Armin Thomas. Three of the four previously worked on model design at Liquid AI Inc.. Its scientific advisers include Microsoft Corp. Chief Scientific Officer Eric Horvitz, Stanford’s Chris Ré, Harvard geneticist George Church and Andrew Weber, a former U.S. assistant secretary of defense for nuclear, chemical and biological defense programs.

Emergence Capital led the seed round. Obvious Ventures, Triatomic Capital Private LP, Factory and First Spark Ventures also took part, with Stripe Inc. co-founder Patrick Collison having backed the earlier pre-seed round.

Image: Radical Numerics