Business Insider
The Digital Bio Revolution: Transforming Healthcare
The Healthcare Crisis
SILICON VALLEY, CA / Business Insider / November 10, 2025 / The United States spends nearly 18% of its GDP, over $4.9 trillion, on healthcare. Yet hospitals frequently operate at a loss, burdened by rising costs and inefficiencies. Drug development exemplifies the problem: it takes 12-15 years and more than $1.2 billion to bring a single therapy to market. Patients wait, costs balloon, and the system strains under the weight. The status quo is unsustainable.
The Digital Bio Revolution
The convergence of biology and artificial intelligence holds promises to rewrite this equation. In drug discovery, AI models can now simulate millions of compound interactions in days, at a fraction of the cost of traditional high-throughput screening. Virtual cell models are beginning to predict how cells will respond to drugs before a single experiment is run, reducing failure rates and accelerating the path from lab bench to bedside. The digital twin of human biology, once science fiction, is quickly becoming reality, shifting medicine from trial-and-error to predictive and personalized.
Our Investment Thesis
At FoundersX Ventures, we see digital bio as a defining opportunity of the next decade. Our strategy focuses on platform companies that leverage AI to tackle biological complexity, creating scalable data engines that improve with each experiment. While powerful AI models can simulate biology at scale, their effectiveness hinges on high-quality biological data-a resource far scarcer than digital data in other sectors. The winners will be companies that overcome this bottleneck, building platforms that grow in value over time.
Portfolio Highlights
1910.ai: Multimodal AI Platform for Modality Agnostic Drug Discovery™
1910 is the only AI-native biotech pioneering small and large molecule therapeutics discovery by integrating massive multimodal data, frontier AI models, and high-throughput lab automation into an infrastructure for AI-enabled drug discovery.
Kernal Bio: Reprogramming cancer treatment with tumor-targeted mRNA
Kernal Bio develops mRNA therapeutics that selectively target specific cells. By programming expression and delivery only in target cells, its platform minimizes side effects while boosting efficacy. The company applies AI to design mRNAs with greater precision, bringing genetic medicine closer to mainstream oncology and immunology.
Glyphic Bio: Cracking the protein universe with single-molecule sequencing
Glyphic Bio is pioneering next-generation protein sequencing. Its mission is to unlock the protein universe with single-molecule resolution, transforming drug discovery, diagnostics, and biomarker development. This visibility could help address diseases that remain poorly understood.
Omniscope: An immune system twin that spans populations and diseases
Omniscope is building the world's most comprehensive immune system twin. By sequencing immune cells across diverse populations, the company is creating a reference atlas to power diagnostics, vaccines, and therapeutics - laying the foundation for personalized immune health.
Zafrens: Unlocking biology with high-throughput microfluidics
Zafrens uses advanced microfluidics to generate massive biological datasets. By profiling millions of cellular responses, the company enables AI models to identify promising therapies more quickly and accurately. Its approach is redefining how large-scale biological data are produced.
Challenges and Outlook
Significant hurdles remain. High-quality biological datasets are limited, and integrating diverse data-from DNA and proteins to clinical outcomes-demands ongoing innovation. However, the future is clear: drug discovery timelines could shrink from decades to months, or even hours. Success will come to those building platforms, not just products, that make biology computable.
The Path Forward
The future of healthcare will not come from incremental changes but from reimagining biology itself as a digital system. Digital bio is not just a new branch of science, it is the foundation for a more efficient, equitable, and sustainable healthcare economy.
About FoundersX Ventures
FoundersX Ventures is a Silicon Valley-based, AI-first venture capital firm founded in 2016. With over 100 early-stage investments, including eight unicorns and 30+ companies each valued over $100M, the firm drives innovation in AI chips, enterprise AI, cybersecurity, fintech, and digital health. The VC firm, featured in WSJ Venture Capital Pro and Business Insider, leads seed-stage deals and co-lead A round deals. Besides Silicon Valley, the firm has offices in Cambridge / Boston and New York. Leo Cui, PhD. is a General Partner at FoundersX based in Cambridge. He holds a Ph.D. in bioengineering from Harvard and postdoctoral training in genome editing in Feng Zhang's lab at MIT.