附近上门

There are plenty of things to worry about these days, and the ability of AI to weaponize biology into one of the largest threats facing our world isn鈥檛 top of mind for most of us.

Seed-stage investors have a different view. Over the past few months, two startups focused on the intersection of AI and biosecurity have raised good-sized initial rounds with among their investors.

, a developer of AI systems that identify biological threats and design countermeasures, last fall in its first known funding round. The New York-headquartered company counts and as backers, along with OpenAI.

Weeks later, , a self-described AI biosecurity company, secured $15 million in a seed round led by OpenAI and joined by investors including , and . The company鈥檚 operating thesis is that as AI capabilities advance, biological risks grow exponentially, so defenses must scale at the same rate.

On the nonprofit front, meanwhile, Cambridge, Massachusetts-based secured grant funding from multiple sources last year, $1.4 million from in December. The organization鈥檚 stated mission is to secure the future from catastrophic pandemics.

A drop in the AI bucket

Given all the capital that has poured into artificial intelligence of late, these are not comparatively large sums going to biosecurity. To put it in perspective, the two biggest seed rounds are less than one-tenth of a percent of the record-setting $110 billion financing OpenAI secured last week.

What鈥檚 more noteworthy than sums invested is these are relatively new areas for startups to scale.

Per 附近上门 data, the term 鈥渂iosecurity鈥� and similar terminology has cropped up in funded startup descriptions but not so much in the context of AI. Funded startups around this theme have also commonly focused on livestock.

The Australian startup , for instance, raised a few million two years ago, , with a focus on tracking biosecurity risks for cattle, pigs, eggs and poultry. And Nebraska-based last year for a business focused on swine disease surveillance.

Running in place

In addition to their AI focus, the latest crop of biosecurity seed-funded startups stand out for the dire scenarios they鈥檙e hoping to contain.

, it’s now faster to weaponize biology than to advance new cures, an ominous development that AI leaders have identified as one of the largest threats of our time. The company envisions a future where any threat to human health can be immediately identified and neutralized.

Red Queen Bio evokes a similarly alarming specter of threats, reflected in its nomenclature. The , a notion that evolution requires constant adaptation to ever-evolving threats, stems from a 鈥淭hrough the Looking Glass鈥� passage. In it, the tyrannical Red Queen explains that in her kingdom, 鈥渋t takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place.鈥�

Running to keep in the same place seems a more broadly apt metaphor for the modern era in myriad domains, not just biosecurity. However, this is one of the spaces where not keeping up carries the potentially deadliest penalties.

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