The Wall Street Journal puts Red Queen Bio’s total raise at $36M. That is a modest sum next to the largest AI labs, though the ambition is not modest at all. The company engineers antibodies against viral threats, including pathogens a powerful enough AI might someday help create.
Influenza comes first. Avian flu and its relatives are the initial targets, with human testing pencilled in for 2027. Further out sit coronaviruses, filoviruses in the Ebola family and the poxviruses.
The pipeline runs as a loop. Models propose antibody designs tuned to grip a viral target tightly. Cells in the lab then manufacture and test each candidate, and those measurements go back into the models, which propose sharper versions. Chief executive Nikolai Eroshenko frames the payoff in scale: a tighter binder needs a smaller dose, and a smaller dose is a product that can be manufactured in bulk.
The stated aim is to scale biological defenses faster than frontier AI capabilities grow. No AI system has yet produced a virus capable of causing a human pandemic.
Both founders came from an earlier startup. Eroshenko and Rajaniemi had worked together at HelixNano, and they left it in 2025 to start again.
OpenAI backed that next step, leading a $15M seed round disclosed last November.
