Blank Bio Announces Seed Financing and Strategic Collaboration with PacBio to Advance RNA Foundation Models for Precision Oncology

Blank Bio, RNA intelligence for precision oncology, led by Jonathan Hsu, Ruian (Ian) Shi, and Philip Fradkin, has announced the closing of a $7.2 million seed financing and a strategic collaboration with Pacific Biosciences (Nasdaq: PACB), a leading developer of high-quality, highly accurate sequencing solutions. The oversubscribed round included Define Ventures, Leonis Capital, Nova Threshold, Ripple Ventures, SignalFire, Y Combinator, and others. Proceeds will support continued model development, expanded pharma and diagnostic collaborations, and new data generation efforts.

Blank Bio is building RNA foundation models that learn from tumor transcriptomes to improve patient-level prediction in oncology.

The funding will support continued model development, expansion of pharma and diagnostics partnerships, and new long-read RNA-seq datasets for use in biomarkers, clinical trials, and diagnostic applications.

“Bulk RNA-seq is highly information-rich but still often reduced to simplified summaries,” said Jonathan Hsu, CEO and Co-Founder of Blank Bio. “We built Blank Bio to apply foundation models to full tumor transcriptomes to generate more precise clinical predictions. This funding supports continued model development, expanded partnerships, and new long-read RNA data for training and validation.”

For its collaboration with PacBio, Blank Bio will generate PacBio HiFi long-read RNA sequencing data from up to 100 patient tumor samples across multiple cancer types.

The data, processed at Seattle Children’s Research Institute, will be used to further train and evaluate its oncology-focused RNA foundation models for improved patient stratification, biomarker discovery, and clinical interpretation.

“PacBio HiFi long-read sequencing is designed to capture biological signals that other technologies miss, particularly in complex tumor transcriptomes,” said David Miller, Global Vice President of Marketing at PacBio. “Blank Bio shows how high-resolution RNA data and machine learning can advance precision oncology, from biomarkers and diagnostics to clinical trial design.”

Bulk RNA-seq is widely used in oncology and drug development, but standard workflows often reduce it to simplified gene-level summaries, losing richer biological signals like isoform and mutation complexity.

Blank Bio is using its funding to build foundation models, datasets, and partnerships that better capture this signal for precision oncology applications.