Boston-based biotechnology company Network Bio has raised $50 million in financing to expand its artificial intelligence platform for studying human biology and disease.
The financing includes backing from Section 32, Thiel Bio, Founders Fund, Breyer Capital, Blue Venture Fund, JSL Health Capital, and other life science and AI-focused investors.
Network Bio plans to use the funding to expand its life science platform, which develops disease-specific AI models trained on large-scale human biological datasets, including tissue, blood, molecular, and clinical data.
Led by CEO and co-founder Asad Ali Ahmad, Network Bio is developing AI models designed to identify biological principles that can transfer across different diseases, tissues, and data types.
“Every patient leaves a barcode of their disease in their tissue, and until now no one has been able to read those barcodes at scale,” said Asad Ali Ahmad, PhD, CEO and Cofounder of Network Bio. “Working with the biobanks of some of the country’s leading academic medical centers, we built the network that makes reading them possible. We then built an AI platform that is already finding signals in conditions it was never trained on. This is the future of medicine.”
Cofounders Hani Goodarzi, PhD and Raphael Potter frame the challenge as one of pairing access with interpretation. “We built Network Bio based on the belief that AI and data hold the keys to advancing the human condition. We have been focused tirelessly on the dual mandate of gaining access to the tissue datasets which explain disease and building the AI systems capable of interpreting the complex results,” they said.
The company’s platform combines a biological research network with a specialized AI architecture. Its research network includes partnerships with academic biobanks such as Mass General Brigham, the University of Pennsylvania, and the University of Colorado Anschutz.
These partnerships provide access to patient-derived biological information, including tissue and blood samples, molecular data, and longitudinal clinical outcomes. Network Bio uses these datasets to study biological changes alongside disease progression and patient outcomes.
The company’s AI architecture is designed specifically for biological research and aims to produce interpretable representations of disease biology. Network Bio believes this could help researchers better understand complex biological signals and identify patterns that may be difficult to detect using traditional approaches.
The company is also developing models that can transfer knowledge across diseases and tissues instead of creating separate computational systems for each condition.
Network Bio has reported research across multiple disease areas, including respiratory, ovarian, and bone diseases. The company has also entered into a co-development and licensing collaboration with an unnamed Fortune 100 healthcare company, valued at more than $30 million.
With the new funding, Network Bio plans to continue expanding its AI and life science platform and its disease-specific models.
The company aims to support applications across disease research and, over time, potentially contribute to areas such as diagnostics, patient stratification and personalized medicine.
