Radical Numerics Raises $50M in Seed Funding

The round also saw participation from Obvious Ventures, Triatomic Capital, Factory and First Spark Ventures.

The company plans to use this funding to scale its next-generation models and expand its team with top-tier frontier AI research talent.

The company’s founders created the field of generative genomics. They developed Evo, the first AI model capable of reading and writing DNA at scale, and one of the largest fully open-source AI projects across any field. Evo and Evo 2 were featured on the cover of Science and Nature, and presented at TED2025 by the CEO.

The model has been used to design new CRISPR systems. External scientists later used it to generate the first fully AI-designed genome—a bacteriophage, which is a virus that infects bacteria and is not harmful to humans.

The company is developing a new type of AI that learns directly from biological data, including DNA, RNA, proteins, and more. It aims to bring all parts of biology together into a single, general biological intelligence system.

Its multimodal models are designed to understand and reason across multiple layers of biology at the same time. This enables applications such as cancer diagnostics, drug target discovery, and biosecurity that are difficult for single-modality models to achieve.

Alongside its launch, Radical Numerics is previewing Omnii, its next-generation genomic language model. Early results show that Omnii sets a new state of the art in identifying causal regulatory variants and can transfer to experimental settings without additional training. It is able to recover experimentally validated functional variants linked to Alzheimer’s disease. The same model also achieves top performance in detecting AI-generated or AI-manipulated pathogens.

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Radical Numerics has a dual mission: advancing biological design for human health and building biodefense tools to protect it. The company is working with a cancer diagnostics partner to apply its multimodal model to pancreatic cancer and multi-cancer detection by combining multiple molecular signals into a single test that current tools may miss.

As AI becomes more advanced, there is growing concern about its potential use in designing biological weapons. To address this, Radical Numerics is partnering with a national lab to use its models to detect, and analyze pathogens, whether they occur naturally or are AI generated.

“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.”

"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 its why we led this round."

About Radical Numerics

Founded by Eric Nguyen, Armin Thomas, Stefano Massaroli, and Michael Poli, Radical Numerics is an AI research lab developing general biological intelligence that can read, write, and design across all areas of biology. The founders created the field of generative genomics with Evo, the first model to enable DNA design using large language models and the largest fully open-source biological AI project to date. Radical Numerics has a dual mission: advancing biological design for human health and developing biodefense tools to protect it.

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