Radical Numerics, an AI research lab focused on building general biological intelligence, emerged from stealth with $50 million in seed funding to advance biological design and strengthen biodefense capabilities.
The financing round was led by Emergence Capital, with participation from Obvious Ventures, Triatomic Capital, Factory and First Spark Ventures. Patrick Collison participated as a pre-seed investor.
Radical Numerics was founded by Eric Nguyen, who serves as CEO, along with Chief AI Scientist Michael Poli, President Stefano Massaroli and CTO Armin Thomas. The founding team previously created the field of generative genomics and developed Evo, the first AI model capable of reading and writing DNA at scale. Evo and its successor, Evo 2, were featured in Science magazine, Nature and at TED2025.
The company said its next-generation AI models are designed to learn from DNA, RNA, proteins and other biological data simultaneously, creating multimodal systems that can reason across multiple dimensions of biology. Radical Numerics believes these capabilities could unlock applications in cancer diagnostics, drug target discovery and biosecurity.
Alongside its launch, the company unveiled Omnii, a genomic language model that has demonstrated early success in identifying causal regulatory variants and transferring zero-shot learning to experimental settings. According to the company, Omnii has recovered experimentally validated functional variants linked to Alzheimer’s disease and achieved state-of-the-art performance in detecting AI-generated or manipulated pathogens.
The new capital will be used to scale the company’s next generation of models and recruit additional AI researchers.
Radical Numerics is also pursuing partnerships aimed at applying its technology to human health and biodefense. The company is working with a cancer diagnostics company on pancreatic and multi-cancer detection, and it is collaborating with a national laboratory to develop systems capable of detecting and characterizing naturally occurring and AI-generated pathogens.
Scientific advisors to the company include Eric Horvitz, chief scientific officer at Microsoft; Stanford professor Chris Ré; Harvard professor George Church; and Andrew Weber, former U.S. Assistant Secretary of Defense for Nuclear, Chemical, and Biological Defense Programs.
KEY QUOTES:
“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. 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.”
Eric Nguyen, CEO, Radical Numerics
“Most labs bolt safety on at the end. Radical Numerics built it into the foundation. 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.”
Gordon Ritter, Founder and General Partner, Emergence Capital
