The AI Utopia Doesn't Exist Without Bio

• AI leaders (Altman, Hassabis, Huang) all frame AI’s peak promise as bio.
  • Disease curing, longevity, scientific discovery = their go-to examples.
• Bio is where AI makes its greatest impact, not consumer chat.
• NFX portfolio: Mana Bio (LNP design), Zip Bio (protein LMs), La Jolla Labs (RNA drugs).
  • Pumpkinseed: spectroscopy chips generating proprietary bio data.
• Bio founders underestimate access to tech capital by ignoring AI framing.
  • Tech investors grok data moats, defensibility, platform scaling.
• Non-AI bio companies can reframe as translation layers between prediction and wet lab.
  • Or: AI for regulatory risk mitigation as the pitch angle.
• Scientists alone can direct AI at humanity’s hardest problems.

X discourse

• @BoWang87: “AI × bio: too slow for AI people, too fast for bio people” (786 likes)
• @bravo_abad: “LLMs don’t understand chemistry — they just need the right representation” (273 likes)
• @oprydai: “AI without neuroscience is blind pattern fitting” (206 likes)
• @Oliver__Hahn: “Computational biology quietly doing more than AI hypothesis headlines” (88 likes)

Omri Drory, Ph.D. — General Partner, NFX · 2025-09-24 · Read on nfx.com