Fidji Simo's ChronicleBio raises $15M to build an "internet of biology" from blood
What's the deal? ChronicleBioDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom →, the health startup co-founded by former OpenAI executive Fidji Simo, has raised $15 million to collect and analyse patient blood at scale, using AI to hunt for cures for chronic diseases. On August 11, it opens a sign-up link for mobile phlebotomy trucks that draw blood at patients' homes.
What's the endgame? Simo's thesis is that biology lacks the training data that made large language models work. "If you look at LLMs, they work so well because the internet existed," she said. "We are missing the internet of biology."
Why now? The company launched in August 2025 with Simo, chief executive Rohit Gupta, and executive chairman Rishi Reddy. In its first year it took 890 blood draws from 709 patients across Utah, Arizona, Texas, and India, building a biobank of more than 3,500 tubes and 153 terabytes of data — roughly three times what GPT-3.5 trained on.
How it works: The trucks reach bedridden patients who rarely appear in medical datasets. The first 250 participants pay nothing; after that the test costs $400, charged at cost. "The whole point for us is not to make money," Simo told Fortune. "It's to collect data so we can find cures."
The company targets POTS, ME/CFS, and long COVID, which it says affect around 300 million people worldwide. Running OpenAI and Anthropic models off the shelf, it claims to have found five sub-diseases inside POTS — some immune-driven, others mitochondria-driven — with identical symptoms. It plans to start testing existing drugs on its own patients before the end of 2026.
What could go wrong? None of it is proven. The five sub-diseases are a company claim, not a peer-reviewed finding, and no results have been published. Drug testing has not begun, and $15 million is small next to pharma research budgets. The $400 test also enters a crowded consumer blood-testing market where Neko Health and others compete.
The signal: Simo, who has POTS herself, ran the FacebookDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom → app at Meta, took Instacart public, and joined OpenAI in 2025 before stepping down in July. She is not the only OpenAI alumnus moving toward biology — researcher Miles Wang left for drug discovery too. Her sharpest argument is about neglect: chronic fatigue syndrome scores worse than cancer on disability measures, she notes, yet its research funding is "absolutely pathetic," partly because it mostly affects women and disables people without killing them.
Read more: fortune.com · thenextweb.com
Image credit: Generated with Gemini
