Network Bio raises $50M in a venture round

Section 32 led the financing, and its managing partner Mike Pellini becomes chairman of the board. Thiel Bio, Founders Fund, Breyer Capital, Blue Venture Fund and JSL Health Capital also took part. The round follows a $17M seed from February 2025, which brings disclosed funding to about $67M. Valuation was not reported. The company has signed a co-development and licensing agreement worth more than $30M with a Fortune 100 healthcare company. It also has a collaboration with Nvidia, valued at $30M, to build a cell-free RNA foundation model. Its data comes from academic biobanks at Mass General Brigham, the University of Pennsylvania, Duke and the University of Colorado Anschutz. Those sites reportedly cover more than 500,000 patients across oncology, immunology, and metabolic and cardiovascular disease. For AI founders, the deal shows where the defensible asset is moving in biology: access to proprietary, outcome-linked data, not model architecture. Network Bio standardizes sample selection and quality across institutions, and it returns harmonized data to partners and the medical centers. That structure pairs revenue from a large customer with data access that competitors would struggle to copy. Founders in regulated or data-scarce fields can treat it as a template for funding data partnerships before the model exists.