OpenAI leads $15M investment in AI biosecurity startup

Code Mastery Centre
15 Nov, 2025

 

OpenAI leads $15M investment in AI biosecurity startup

OpenAI announced Thursday it will lead a $15 million seed round for Red Queen Bio, a startup focused on preventing artificial intelligence from being weaponized to create biological threats, marking the ChatGPT maker's second major biosecurity investment in less than a month.

The San Francisco-based company, spun out from mRNA therapeutics firm Helix Nano, aims to develop AI-powered defenses that evolve at the same pace as potential bioweapons threats. Red Queen Bio will combine computational models with laboratory testing to identify vulnerabilities in biological systems and design countermeasures, according to co-founder Hannu Rajaniemi.​

"It was clear that biological capabilities were advancing faster than we anticipated," Rajaniemi told Reuters. "We felt we needed to start developing defenses".

Expanding OpenAI's Safety Portfolio

The investment builds on OpenAI's October backing of Valthos, a New York-based biosecurity software company that raised $30 million. Jason Kwon, OpenAI's chief strategy officer, said the company remains open to supporting additional startups addressing similar risks. "We want to increase the overall resilience of the overall ecosystem," Kwon told Reuters. "One of the best ways you can deal with the risk mitigation is more technology".

The funding round also drew participation from Cerberus Ventures, Fifty Years, and Halcyon Futures. As part of the transaction, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and board member Nicole Seligman will receive shares in Red Queen Bio due to their prior investments in Helix Nano, though neither participated in approving the deal. OpenAI's chief compliance officer and unconflicted board members reviewed and authorized the investment.

Racing Against AI-Enabled Threats

Red Queen Bio takes its name from Lewis Carroll's "Through the Looking-Glass," referencing the constant evolutionary race between biological threats and defensive capabilities. The startup's founders observed during collaboration with OpenAI that frontier AI models demonstrated remarkable biological creativity, with potential applications for breakthrough therapies—but also darker possibilities.​

Safety experts warn that AI systems capable of accelerating drug discovery could also lower barriers for malicious actors seeking to engineer dangerous pathogens. Recent research has exposed vulnerabilities in synthetic protein screening processes, and multiple AI labs have raised concerns about models approaching or exceeding critical security thresholds for providing bioweapons development information.​

Red Queen Bio plans to map AI-enabled biological threats and pre-build medical countermeasures using leading AI models, lab automation, and reinforcement learning. The company, structured as a Public Benefit Corporation, has committed to working with all AI labs, biopharmaceutical firms, and governments.

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