Radical Numerics, an AI research lab building general biological intelligence, today announced its launch with $50 million in seed funding. The round was led by Emergence Capital, with participation from Obvious Ventures, Triatomic Capital, Factory and First Spark Ventures. The company’s pre-seed investors included Patrick Collison.
Radical Numerics 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, Liquid AI founding team), and Armin Thomas (CTO, postdoc Stanford with Chris Ré, Liquid AI). 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.
The company’s founders created the field of generative genomics, producing Evo, the first AI model capable of both reading and writing DNA at scale, and the largest fully open-source AI project across any domain. Evo and Evo 2 were featured on the cover of Science magazine, Nature and at TED2025 by its CEO. The model was used to design novel CRISPR systems, and was later used by external scientists to generate the first complete AI-designed genome: a bacteriophage, which is a virus that infects bacteria and is not harmful to humans. The new funding will be used for scaling the next generation of its models and to expand the team with frontier AI research talent.
The company is building a new class of AI that learns directly from biological data across DNA, RNA, proteins, and beyond, unifying all the pieces of biology into a single, general biological intelligence. Its multimodal models are designed to reason across every dimension of biology, at once, opening paths toward cancer diagnostics, drug target identification, and biosecurity that single-modality models cannot translate.
Alongside its launch, Radical Numerics is previewing Omnii, its next-generation genomic language model. 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, Omnii recovers experimentally validated functional variants at loci associated with Alzheimer’s disease. The same model also achieves state-of-the-art performance for detecting AI-generated or AI-manipulated pathogens.
“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, CEO of Radical Numerics. “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.”
Radical Numerics holds a dual mandate: to advance biological design for human health and build the biodefenses to protect it. The company is partnering with a cancer diagnostics company to apply its multimodal model to pancreatic and multi-cancer detection, combining multiple molecular signals into a single diagnostic that existing tools may miss. As agentic AI becomes more capable, one of the greatest concerns among frontier labs and governments is the potential use of AI to design biological weapons. In response, Radical Numerics is partnering with a national lab to use its models to detect and characterize pathogens, whether naturally occurring or AI-generated.
“Most labs bolt safety on at the end. Radical Numerics built it into the foundation,” said Gordon Ritter, Founder and General Partner at Emergence Capital. “They’ve paired frontier-model capability with real biosecurity expertise to open a scientific field that didn’t exist before. That combination is rare, and it’s why we led this round.”
