Red Queen Bio

Today, we are launching Red Queen Bio, an AI biosecurity company. The Red Queen hypothesis describes a species’ co-evolution with ever-evolving opponents. As AI capabilities advance, biological risks grow exponentially. Our mission is to scale biological defenses at the same rate to ensure continuous human flourishing.

We, the founders of Red Queen Bio (Nikolai and Hannu) have worked together for almost a decade as co-founders of HelixNano, a clinical-stage mRNA company. During a collaboration with OpenAI, we saw frontier models display remarkable biological creativity, with tremendous potential to help design breakthrough therapies. But in spite of our excitement, we could not unsee or ignore the dark twin of those capabilities. It was clear that safe scaling of AI biology needed new defensive infrastructure to contain and counter the emerging threats. We spun out Red Queen Bio to build it. This work has begun with a $15M seed round, led by OpenAI and joined by mission-aligned investors including Cerberus Ventures, Fifty Years and Halcyon Futures.

Our core thesis is defensive co-scaling for biology: not merely using AI for biodefense, but coupling defensive compute and funding to the same technological and financial forces that drive the capability race. 

Red Queen Bio works with frontier labs to map AI-enabled biothreats and pre-build medical countermeasures against them. Critically, we are engineering this process to be directly scaleable with compute. Our countermeasure design pipeline is built upon leading models themselves, lab automation and reinforcement learning. Together with on-demand biologics manufacturing, this stack provides the technological foundation for defensive co-scaling.

To fuel this process, we also need financial co-scaling. Governments have flat biodefense budgets and cannot solve this problem alone. But they can help massively by creating the right incentives for the private sector, as they have done for other safety-critical industries. We are engaging with policymakers in the US and abroad on this. And the civilizational need aside, the capital behind the biggest economic transformation in human history will not tolerate unpriced tail risk of this magnitude for long. We're committed to cracking the business model for AI biosecurity, borrowing from frameworks like catastrophic risk insurance, and working directly with the labs to find what scales. If successful, it can also serve as a blueprint for addressing other AI risks beyond bio.

Defensive co-scaling of AI biology has to take place across the entire industry and the globe. Accordingly, Red Queen Bio is committed to open collaboration with all AI labs, biopharma and governments. We are a Public Benefit Corporation, with governance to ensure our mission takes precedence over any individual partnership.

Working together on this is in everybody’s interest. But in the face of fast timelines and enormous stakes, it’s easy to feel trapped in the AGI race dynamics. Yet, these incentive structures are not physical laws. They are no more real than others we can create. Both biology and human imagination are inconceivably powerful in finding paths to survival and flourishing.

We are choosing a different race. One where defense keeps up with offense and economics spurs safety. The starting pistol has gone off. It’s time to run together.