$50m Network Bio launch & NVIDIA collaboration

Palo Alto, CA-based biotech Network Bio launched today with $50 million in financing. It has also announced a collaboration with NVIDIA to build the world’s first foundation model trained on cell-free RNA.

Network Bio has built a research network of leading US academic biobanks, including Mass General Brigham, University of Pennsylvania, Duke University, and University of Colorado Anschutz, providing access to 500,000+ patients across oncology, immunology, and metabolic and cardiovascular disease. The network combines patient-derived tissue, paired blood samples, and longitudinal clinical outcomes, creating what Network Bio says is the world’s largest patient tissue training dataset of its kind.

The biotech is also developing the world’s first foundation model trained on cell-free RNA, combining its proprietary biological datasets with NVIDIA accelerated computing, Parabricks, and BioNeMo Recipes.

Network Bio’s vertically integrated platform combines two foundational technologies: a biological research network and bio-native AI architecture purpose-built to learn from multimodal biological data, overcome technical confounders, and generate interpretable representations of disease biology that generalise across diseases. Peer-reviewed research on this has been published in top-tier journals, including Nature Machine Intelligence.

Following data harmonisation and integrated analyses, generated data is returned to commercial partners and its collaborating institutions – supporting basic science and biomedical research at participating US academic medical centres.

The $50 million financing comes from Section 32, Thiel Bio, Founders Fund, Breyer Capital, Blue Venture Fund, JSL Health Capital, and other life sciences and AI investors, and Network Bio has already signed a $30m+ co-development and licensing agreement with a Fortune 100, top-10 healthcare company to develop next-generation AI models.

Asad Ali Ahmad, CEO and co-founder of Network Bio, stated: "Every patient leaves a barcode of their disease in their tissue and, until now, no one has been able to read those barcodes at scale […] This is the future of medicine."

Last month, Bristol Myers Squibb claimed it was the first life sciences company to buy a new AI supercomputing infrastructure blueprint from NVIDIA, saying it will deliver a "step change" in computational power and efficiency. The US pharma group is deploying an NVIDIA DGX SuperPOD, which is based on the chip giant's Vera Rubin NVL72 system – a next-generation AI and supercomputing platform, specifically designed for complex and autonomous agentic AI workflows and scientific computing, named after acclaimed dark matter researcher Vera Cooper Rubin.