AI-native life sciences company Genesight has announced the completion of a seed funding round raising tens of millions of yuan, with Tsinghua Capital leading the investment.
The capital raised in this round will be allocated towards building three core competitive advantages: data, models, and clinical applications. It will accelerate the company's collaborative deployment and commercialization efforts with top-tier Class A tertiary hospitals, and advance its long-term strategic goal of evolving from a world-class model in cellular science to a foundational operating system for life sciences.
The concept of a virtual cell is not entirely novel. Often referred to as an AI Virtual Cell (AIVC), it involves using artificial intelligence to construct digital models capable of simulating cellular states and predicting cellular behavior.
To date, Genesight has established in-depth collaborations with several top-tier Class A tertiary hospitals. The focus is on creating a closed-loop, disease-specific data system centered on tissue samples collected from real patients before and after medication. The company is advancing applications in three key areas: first, clinical patient stratification, partnering with hospital clinical trial centers to serve multiple treatment cohorts and drug pipelines; second, monetizing model capabilities by offering services like drug repurposing, target screening, and model tools to attract pharmaceutical companies and multinational corporations as potential clients; third, data platform partnerships, continuously expanding high-quality training data through automated sequencing to enhance the foundational model.
Regarding the team composition, founder and CEO Du Runshi was born in 2004. An undergraduate at UCLA, he assembled a team after his junior year, took a leave of absence, and committed to full-time entrepreneurship. He has prior experience in consecutive AI-focused startups and possesses deep insights into the AI-plus-life-sciences sector. CTO Wang Yixuan is a Ph.D. candidate in Computer Science at The Chinese University of Hong Kong, with extensive expertise in single-cell AI and drug perturbation prediction. She has led model development for several virtual cell companies both in China and internationally, representing a rare native scholar in the virtual cell field. CFO Chen Cong has over a decade of experience in the pharmaceutical and healthcare industry, bringing substantial industry resources and a robust capital network.