Biostate AI, a deeptech startup working at the intersection of artificial intelligence and RNA sequencing, has raised $12 million in a Series A funding round led by venture capital firm Accel, with participation from Gaingels, Mana Ventures, InfoEdge Ventures, and existing backers Matter Venture Partners, Vision Plus Capital, and Catapult Ventures.<\/p>\n
Founded by former professors and serial entrepreneurs David Zhang (ex-Rice University) and Ashwin Gopinath (ex-MIT), Biostate AI is aiming to build what it calls the “foundation model for molecular medicine.” <\/p>\n
The company\u2019s goal is to dramatically expand access to\u00a0RNA sequencing (RNAseq)\u2014a cornerstone of precision medicine\u2014by cutting costs, improving data quality, and applying generative AI to glean actionable insights from the human transcriptome.<\/p>\n
The startup\u2019s platform is already being used in over 150 pilot projects, including collaborations with Cornell University (for leukemia) and the Accelerated Cure Project (for multiple sclerosis), and has processed over 10,000 RNA samples since going commercial just two quarters ago.<\/p>\n
Precision medicine at scale<\/p>\n
RNAseq has long been a powerful but costly and technically fragmented method to track real-time gene expression and health markers. Biostate AI claims it is eliminating these bottlenecks using a combination of proprietary wet-lab techniques and AI-based analysis that can scale like a modern software product.<\/p>\n
Its proprietary technologies include:<\/p>\n
1. BIRT (Biostate\u2019s Integrated RNA Technology), which uses an innovative multiplexing process to process multiple tissue samples simultaneously, cutting sequencing costs significantly.<\/p>\n
2. PERD, a signal-filtering method that removes analytical \u201cnoise\u201d in RNA datasets caused by variability between labs and equipment.<\/p>\n
These innovations, the company claims, allow customers to run 2-3x more samples within the same budget. With this data advantage, Biostate is building LLM-style generative models trained on RNA sequences to predict disease evolution, recurrence, and treatment responses.<\/p>\n
\u201cJust as ChatGPT learned from the internet\u2019s text, we\u2019re training our models on the grammar of biology from billions of RNA expressions,\u201d said Ashwin Gopinath, co-founder and CTO.<\/p>\n
The bigger play: From diagnostics to therapies<\/p>\n
While Biostate\u2019s initial focus is on RNAseq services for research labs and biotech companies in the U.S., its long-term ambition is to become an end-to-end platform for precision diagnostics and therapeutics. Its stack includes Quantaquill, a generative AI tool that drafts publication-ready manuscripts from clinical datasets\u2014streamlining scientific writing alongside biological discovery.<\/p>\n
The startup is also building a large, consented, de-identified dataset of RNA profiles, enabling the development of disease-specific predictive models. \u201cWe\u2019re moving the entire diagnostics workflow closer to the patient,\u201d said\u00a0David Zhang, co-founder and CEO.<\/p>\n
Zhang, who previously invented several DNA diagnostic tools at Rice, described Biostate as a natural progression: \u201cEvery diagnostic I\u2019ve built was about bringing answers faster. Biostate takes the biggest leap yet\u2014by making full-transcriptome sequencing affordable.\u201d<\/p>\n
Gopinath, whose work is personally motivated by his wife\u2019s leukemia diagnosis, added: \u201cWe\u2019re not just trying to predict disease. Eventually, we want to eliminate it.\u201d<\/p>\n
Accel backs Biostate\u2019s AI-first thesis for medicine<\/p>\n
\u201cBiostate is doing for medicine what OpenAI did for text: scaling data collection so that AI can finally work,\u201d said Shekhar Kirani, Partner at Accel. \u201cBy combining generative AI with next-gen wetlab innovation, they\u2019re laying the foundation for truly personalised, scalable healthcare.\u201d<\/p>\n
So far, Biostate has raised $20 million+ in total, including a prior seed round backed by deep-tech angels like Dario Amodei (Anthropic), Emily Leproust (Twist Bioscience), and Mike Schnall-Levin (10X Genomics).<\/p>\n
With offices in Houston, Palo Alto, Bengaluru, and Shanghai, Biostate is now positioning itself as a global player in molecular AI, with plans to expand collaborations in oncology, cardiovascular disease, and autoimmune disorders in FY26.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Biostate AI, a deeptech startup working at the intersection of artificial intelligence and RNA sequencing, has raised $12…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":122744,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3094],"tags":[323,51,16547,3134,5036,1197,16220,16,15],"class_list":{"0":"post-122743","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-entrepreneurship","8":"tag-ai","9":"tag-business","10":"tag-deeptech","11":"tag-entrepreneurship","12":"tag-funding","13":"tag-investment","14":"tag-investors","15":"tag-uk","16":"tag-united-kingdom"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/114551960663944366","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/122743","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=122743"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/122743\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/122744"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=122743"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=122743"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=122743"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}