Radical Numerics raises $50M to build multimodal biological intelligence from DNA, RNA, and proteins

<cite index="31-1,31-2">Radical Numerics, an AI research lab, announced its launch with $50 million in seed funding led by Emergence Capital, with participation from Obvious Ventures, Triatomic Capital, Factory and First Spark Ventures</cite>. <cite index="31-2">The company was founded by Eric Nguyen (CEO, PhD Stanford Bioengineering & AI), Michael Poli (Chief AI Scientist, PhD Stanford, Liquid AI founding team), Stefano Massaroli (President, postdoc with Yoshua Bengio), and Armin Thomas (CTO, postdoc Stanford with Chris Ré)</cite>. <cite index="31-2">Patrick Collison was a pre-seed investor, and scientific advisors include Eric Horvitz (Chief Scientific Officer at Microsoft), Chris Ré at Stanford, George Church at Harvard, and Andrew Weber, former U.S. Assistant Secretary of Defense for Nuclear, Chemical, and Biological Defense Programs</cite>.

<cite index="31-3,31-4">The founders created Evo, the first AI model capable of reading and writing DNA at scale and the largest fully open-source AI project in any domain</cite>. <cite index="31-3">Evo and Evo 2 were featured on the cover of Science magazine, Nature and at TED2025; the model was used to design novel CRISPR systems, and external scientists used it to generate the first complete AI-designed genome—a bacteriophage</cite>. <cite index="31-3">Radical Numerics is now building a new class of AI that learns directly from biological data across DNA, RNA, proteins, and beyond, unifying all pieces of biology into a single general biological intelligence</cite>.

<cite index="33-2">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</cite>. <cite index="33-2">The revenue model is a mix of API licensing, fine-tuned proprietary models for pharma partners, and milestone payments</cite>. <cite index="37-2">The global AI in genomics market was valued at $1.26 billion in 2025 and is forecast to reach $18.82 billion by 2033, at a compound annual growth rate of 40.3%</cite>.

<cite index="33-3">The same models that could accelerate cancer diagnostics could also lower the barrier to designing biological weapons; Radical Numerics brought on Andrew Weber, former U.S. assistant secretary of defense, as an advisor and is partnering with a national lab to build AI-powered pathogen detection</cite>. For biotech and defense architects, this signals a new category of multimodal biological AI entering production: unlike point-solution tools (DeepMind's AlphaFold for proteins, Inceptive for RNA), Radical Numerics' end-to-end molecular reasoning spans the full biological stack, which carries both unprecedented drug-discovery leverage and concrete national-security implications worth tracking.