5 Interesting Startup Deals You May Have Missed: AI That Dispatches The Plumber, Underground Warfare And Cutting Down Private-Market Paperwork

openai — this is a monthly column that runs down five interesting startup funding deals that may have flown under the radar. Check out our previous entry here.

Our inboxes overflowed with interesting deals in the past month, but we managed to sift through them all to find the five most intriguing ones. They include a startup that’s simultaneously developing AI models for biology and trying to prevent the threats that stem from those types of advances, a company that says it wants to prevent modern day private markets from the kind of paperwork crisis that shut down Wall Street in the ’60s, and AI agents that can dispatch plumbers and electricians to your door. $50M for ‘general biological intelligence’ AI has conquered text, images and code. Now one startup wants to do the same for DNA. San Francisco-based Radical Numerics last month emerged from stealth with a hefty $50 million seed round led by Emergence Capital, with participation from Obvious Ventures, Triatomic Capital, Factory and First Spark Ventures. The startup said it also received pre-seed backing from Stripe co-founder Patrick Collison. Radical Numerics was founded by the team behind Evo, one of the first AI models capable of reading and generating DNA sequences at scale. The startup’s mission is even more ambitious: building what it calls “general biological intelligence,” or multimodal AI models that can reason across DNA, RNA, proteins and other biological data to accelerate drug discovery, cancer diagnostics and biosecurity. Alongside the funding, the company previewed Omnii, its next-generation genome language model. The company’s dual focus on human health and biodefense reflects a growing theme in frontier AI investing. Crunchbase data shows that as models become increasingly capable of designing biological systems, investors have poured tens of millions of dollars into startups that promise not only to accelerate scientific discovery, but also help detect and defend against AI-generated biological threats. “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,” Radical Numerics CEO Eric Nguyen said in a statement. “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.