Biodefense startup Valthos emerged from stealth Friday with $30 million in funding backed by ChatGPT creator OpenAI to develop and use artificial intelligence to detect and counter biological threats in real time.
The company develops AI systems that update medical countermeasures to match the speed of biological threats, enabling researchers and government agencies to identify and respond to pathogens as they emerge.
“Of all AI applications, biotechnology has the highest upside and the most catastrophic downside,” the company wrote on X.
Founded in New York last November, Valthos is led by Kathleen McMahon, formerly head of life sciences at Palantir Technologies; Tess van Stekelenburg, former researcher in computational neuroscience at the University of Oxford; and Victor Mao, a founding AI engineer who previously worked as a research engineer at Google DeepMind.
“In this new world, the only way to move forward is to be faster. So we decided to build the technology stack for biodefense,” they wrote. “Our team of computational biologists and software engineers apply cutting-edge AI to identify biological threats and update medical countermeasures in real time. »
Lux Capital and Founders Fund join the OpenAI Startup Fund in the $30 million investment. The company announced it is hiring engineers and researchers to expand its platform for government and life sciences partners.
“Technology is evolving rapidly. One of the best ways to keep pace is to have more technology, more research, more startups and more entrepreneurship,” Jason Kwon, OpenAI’s chief strategy officer, said on what surrounds us. As AI and biotechnology rapidly advance, biodefense is one such vertical.
Understanding biodefense
Biodefense refers to technologies and systems designed to protect populations from biological threats, ranging from natural diseases to laboratory accidents or intentionally engineered pathogens. Traditional defense measures rely on vaccines, detection networks and drug stockpiles, but these are often too slow for a world where synthetic biology can quickly create new or modified organisms.
Valthos said its platform would use AI to analyze biological sequences and adapt existing drugs or treatments in response – a technology the company said could reduce the time between identifying a new threat and developing a response from months to hours.
Researchers are increasingly using AI to predict disease risk before symptoms appear. A model called Delphi-2M, trained on data from the UK Biobank, can predict more than 1,000 conditions up to 20 years in advance, showing how AI could shift medicine from reaction to prevention and, in biodefense, help detect emerging epidemics before they spread.
Valthos’ announcement follows a RAND Corporation report released this week warning that governments are unprepared to handle AI-driven cyber crises.
“Today, it is faster to weaponize biology than to develop new cures,” Valthos said in a statement. “Our future is at stake.”
Neither OpenAI nor Valthos responded to requests for comment from Decrypt.
