Biotech pharma

Blank Bio

Website
Founded 2025Origin source ↗Checked 2026-09-15

Overview

Blank Bio is an applied AI research lab focused on increasing the success rates of clinical trials. We do this by training RNA foundation models that learn the patterns that shape disease progression and patient response to treatment. We aim to help pharma make more informed decisions in clinical trials by capturing the biology that makes each patient’s tumour unique.

We’re a technical team of AI scientists and engineers from companies including Recursion, Deep Genomics, DeepMind, and Amazon, and institutions including Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Centre, Stanford, and the Vector Institute.

Company description As recorded 2026-11-08
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Product & workflow

Blank Bio enables pharma teams to identify the right patients for their clinical trials and predict how their disease will progress.

Source-reported As recorded 2026-10-18

Customers & use cases

Blank Bio builds AI foundation models that help pharma teams identify the right patients for clinical trials and predict disease progression.

Source-reported As recorded 2026-10-18

Funding statements

Blank Bio announces seed financing and strategic collaboration with PacBio.

Source-reported As recorded 2026-09-27

Founders & team

Previously Orthrus Bio

Company history As recorded 2026-11-08

Jonny Hsu

Founder/CEO

Working on foundation models for RNA therapeutics. I was an early employee at Valence Discovery, a biotech startup that spun out from Mila. I led product and strategy. Valence was acquired by Recursion (NASDAQ: RXRX) in May 2023. I stayed on afterwards to help build out the AI research engine of Recursion called Valence Labs. Biochemist by training | Waterloo graduate

LinkedIn X
Founder profile As recorded 2026-09-15

Philip Fradkin

Founder

Building AI for the most designable molecule in the world: RNA Published at top ML & Bio conferences including best paper at Foundation models for science @ Neurips. Built self-supervised learning applications for RNA, small molecules, and phenomics. Playing long term games in ML for Biology. One of the first employees at Deep Genomics. PhD from University of Toronto.

LinkedIn X
Founder profile As recorded 2026-09-15

Ian Shi

Founder/CTO

Building foundational models for RNA therapeutics at Blank Bio. Just defended my PhD in CS at the University of Toronto. Published at ICML, NeurIPS, Nature Comms; used 4 GPUs to pre-train an mRNA foundation model that beat competitors using months of compute on thousands of H100s. Now scaling our models to unlock new possibilities in the RNA therapeutic space. Previously at Amazon building software, interned at Pinterest and Amazon as a research scientist in between.

LinkedIn X
Founder profile As recorded 2026-09-15
6team members reported
Source-reported As recorded 2026-09-15

Founded 2025 · Source

News & product activity

Sources & observations

Hacker News · Y Combinator

Profile depthenriched profile
Website observationwebsite reachable
Last website check2026-11-11
Location · source statedSan Francisco, CA, USA
Pricing evidenceNo pricing page confirmed
Maturity: Not assessed · 3 of 6 areas documented

Source-based assessment · automated evidence rules

The retained text does not establish product availability or customer use.

Maturity is an evidence-based assessment, not a success rating. It may understate the current stage where evidence is limited. Coverage records documented areas, not a complete or independently audited company history.

Stage definitions
independent websitesource corroborationreachable websitedescriptive evidenceclassified market and modelsourced peoplesourced founding yeardated product or funding activity
startup.observe Directory coverage · Sources & method