{"id":1453,"date":"2026-06-15T12:09:16","date_gmt":"2026-06-15T12:09:16","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/crosscountrymovingteams.com\/?p=1453"},"modified":"2026-06-15T12:09:16","modified_gmt":"2026-06-15T12:09:16","slug":"exclusive-the-researchers-who-built-ai-generated-dna-just-raised-50-million-to-reinvent-biology","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/crosscountrymovingteams.com\/?p=1453","title":{"rendered":"Exclusive: The researchers who built AI-generated DNA just raised $50 million to reinvent biology"},"content":{"rendered":"<div>\n<p>After receiving a master\u2019s of engineering at Cornell and doing a stint training AI to interpret and understand the visual world, Nguyen enrolled in a Stanford bioengineering PhD program specifically to find a problem worth fighting for.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>Read more <a href=\"https:\/\/crosscountrymovingteams.com\/?p=1451\">Social Security faces steep cuts. These senators want to bet on stocks and $27 trillion in debt to save it\u2014but \u2018the gamble does not always pay off\u2019<\/a><\/p>\n<p>\u201cI basically went back to the PhD to look for purpose,\u201d he told <em>Fortune<\/em>. \u201cI wanted to find something that I thought I could contribute to, that if I didn\u2019t work on it, nobody else would.\u201d He found it in DNA.<\/p>\n<div>\n<div>\n<div><\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<p>Nguyen\u2019s startup Radical Numerics emerged from stealth with a $50 million seed round led by Emergence Capital, <em>Fortune<\/em> learned exclusively. Obvious Ventures, Triatomic Capital, Factory, and First Spark Ventures also participated. Patrick Collison, the CEO of Stripe and cofounder of the Arc Institute, backed the company at pre-seed.<\/p>\n<p>Radical Numerics teaches AI to read, write, and reason in the language of biology\u2014not just DNA, but RNA, proteins, and every other molecule that makes living systems work, all at once, in a single model.<\/p>\n<p>The company\u2019s founding team\u2014Nguyen, Michael Poli (chief AI scientist), Stefano Massaroli (president), and Armin Thomas (chief technology officer)\u2014are among the researchers who created the field of generative genomics. Three of the four previously built core technology at Liquid AI, an MIT-spinout designing new AI model designs.<\/p>\n<p>Together they built Evo and Evo 2, the first AI models capable of generating DNA at scale, trained on the genomes of more than 100,000 species. Last September, researchers using Evo\u2019s open-source weights produced the world\u2019s first fully AI-designed functional virus (it was harmless to humans). That milestone is what pushed the team to build a company.\u00a0<\/p>\n<div>\n<div><\/div>\n<\/div>\n<p>\u201cIt still wasn\u2019t being picked up in the way we thought it would,\u201d Nguyen said of the academic work. \u201cSo we basically said: we have to show the recipe.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>The overall AI drug discovery market is projected to reach $25 billion by 2035, and competitor Ginkgo Bioworks recently signed a five-year AI platform deal with Google Cloud.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>Read more <a href=\"https:\/\/crosscountrymovingteams.com\/?p=1449\">Trump gets the peace deal he wants and rages against Israel\u2019s Netanyahu: \u2018He has no f\u2014ing judgement. I let him know that\u2019<\/a><\/p>\n<div>\n<div>\n<div><\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<p>But most AI biology companies today are single-modality like Isomorphic Labs for proteins or Inceptive for RNA (which just signed a deal with Alnylam potentially worth $2 billion). Radical Numerics is instead betting that the bottleneck in drug development is about understanding how they behave inside an entire biological system. <\/p>\n<div>\n<div><\/div>\n<\/div>\n<p>\u201cGetting the drug made won\u2019t be the bottleneck forever,\u201d Nguyen said. \u201cYou have to understand the whole system.\u201d<\/p>\n<div>\n<div><\/div>\n<\/div>\n<div>\n<div><\/div>\n<\/div>\n<p>The company has two early commercial partnerships: one applying its multimodal model to pancreatic and multi-cancer detection, and one with a national laboratory to detect and characterize pathogens, including AI-generated ones. The revenue model is still taking shape but is a mix of API licensing, fine-tuned proprietary models for pharma partners, and milestone payments.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>\u201cNo one has figured out the right business model for how AI companies commercialize in life sciences,\u201d Nguyen argued. \u201cIf anybody says they have a formula, they\u2019re just full of it.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>There\u2019s a catch baked into the entire enterprise. The same models that could accelerate cancer diagnostics could also lower the barrier to designing biological weapons, and Radical Numerics knows it better than anyone, because its own open-source work enabled that first AI-designed genome. \u201cThe defense side is sorely losing the race,\u201d Nguyen said.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>The company brought on Andrew Weber, former U.S. assistant secretary of defense for nuclear, chemical and biological programs, as an advisor, and is partnering with a national lab specifically to build AI-powered pathogen detection. Future model releases won\u2019t automatically be open-source.<\/p>\n<div>\n<div>\n<div><\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<div>\n<div><\/div>\n<\/div>\n<p>Ninety-eight percent of the human genome is still not understood. Nguyen is betting the same technology that could one day explain it could also protect against those who might exploit it. That\u2019s either the best argument for building Radical Numerics\u2014or the most urgent reason to hope it works.<\/p>\n<p>Read more <a href=\"https:\/\/crosscountrymovingteams.com\/?p=1443\">A warning from Amazon led the White House to shut down Anthropic\u2019s Mythos model<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Radical Numerics is betting that the future of bio-defense and AI drug discovery lies in understanding entire biological systems\u2014not individual molecules.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1452,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[158],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1453","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-science"],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v27.7 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/product\/yoast-seo-wordpress\/ -->\n<title>Exclusive: The researchers who built AI-generated DNA just raised $50 million to reinvent biology - 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