In brief
- Valthos launched with $30 million from the OpenAI Startup Fund, Lux Capital, and Founders Fund.
- Its AI tools aim to detect and neutralize biological threats faster than traditional biodefense systems.
- The launch follows RAND’s warning that governments are unprepared for fast-moving AI-driven crises.
Biodefense startup Valthos emerged from stealth on Friday with $30 million in funding backed by ChatGPT creator OpenAI to develop and use artificial intelligence to detect and counter biological threats in real time.
The company develops AI systems that update medical countermeasures to match the speed of the biological threats, allowing researchers and government agencies to identify and respond to pathogens as fast as they emerge.
“Of all AI applications, biotechnology has the highest upside and most catastrophic downside,” the company wrote on X.
Founded in New York last November, Valthos is led by Kathleen McMahon, formerly Head of Life Science at Palantir Technologies; Tess van Stekelenburg, a former researcher of computational neuroscience at the University of Oxford; and Victor Mao, a founding AI engineer who previously worked as a research engineer at Google DeepMind.
“In this new world, the only way forward is to be faster. So we set out to build the tech stack for biodefense,” they wrote. “Our team of computational biologists and software engineers applies frontier AI to identify biological threats and update medical countermeasures in real-time.”
Joining the OpenAI Startup Fund in the $30 million investment are Lux Capital and Founders Fund. The company said it is hiring engineers and researchers to expand its platform for government and life sciences partners.
“Technology is moving fast. One of the best ways to keep up is with more technology, more research, more startups and more entrepreneurship,” Jason Kwon, OpenAI’s chief strategy officer, said on X. “An industrial ecosystem of builders, companies and solutions further democratizes AI to provide broad resilience, and ensures the U.S. continues to lead as AI increasingly powers everything around us. As AI and biotech rapidly advance, biodefense is one of those verticals.”
Understanding biodefense
Biodefense refers to technologies and systems built to protect populations from biological threats—ranging from naturally occurring diseases to lab accidents or deliberately engineered pathogens. Traditional defense measures rely on vaccines, detection networks, and drug stockpiles, but those are often too slow for a world where synthetic biology can rapidly create new or modified organisms.
Valthos said its platform will use AI to analyze biological sequences and adapt existing medicines or treatments in response—technology the company claims could shrink the time between identifying a new threat and developing a response from months to hours.
Researchers are increasingly using AI to forecast disease risk before symptoms appear. A model called Delphi-2M, trained on UK Biobank data, can predict more than 1,000 conditions up to 20 years in advance, showing how AI could shift medicine from reaction to prevention, and in biodefense, help detect emerging outbreaks before they spread.
The Valthos announcement follows a RAND Corporation report this week warning that governments are unprepared to handle AI-driven cyber crises.
“Today, it’s faster to weaponize biology than to advance new cures,” Valthos said in a statement. “Our future hangs in the balance.”
Neither OpenAI nor Valthos responded to requests for comment by Decrypt.