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Blank Bio

RNA intelligence for precision medicine

Y CombinatorSummer 2025ActiveHealthcareTherapeutics

What they do

Problem

Pharma companies face low clinical trial success rates due to limited ability to predict disease progression and patient response to treatments.

Solution

Blank Bio builds RNA foundation models that learn biological patterns from RNA data to inform precision medicine and improve clinical trial decision-making.

Who it's for

Pharmaceutical companies and biotech teams running clinical trials and developing therapeutics.

Founders

Jonny Hsu
Founder

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

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.

Ian Shi
Founder

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.

Open roles 4

Machine Learning Research Scientist
San Francisco, CA, US · Full-time · $150K - $250K · 0.20% - 1.00%
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Machine Learning Engineer
San Francisco, CA, US · Full-time · $150K - $200K · 0.20% - 1.00%
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Software Engineer
San Francisco, CA, US · Full-time · $150K - $250K · 0.20% - 1.00%
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Computational Biologist
San Francisco, CA, US · Full-time · $125K - $200K · 0.20% - 1.00%
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