Valthos raises $30M from Founders Fund, Lux Capital, and OpenAI to build AI-powered biodefense infrastructure

get started for free. New technical difficulty unlocked. We haven't seen that before. We have Katherine from Valos uh coming in to the TVPN Ultra Dome. She I believe is in the reream waiting room. Let's bring in Kathleen. Uh welcome back to the show. Welcome back.

We had you on the show and it was a very fun conversation and we there were some things that we could talk about, there were some things that we couldn't talk about. I'm glad that we're here today and we have plenty to talk about.

Uh but please uh kick us off with an introduction on a little bit more on yourself and the company and what you're announcing today. Yeah, last time I was here I was so stealthy, but now very excited to uh announce what we've been working on. Uh I'm Kathleen.

I'm the co-founder and CEO of Belos, which is the next generation biode company. Uh so we are trying to build infrastructure for American bio defense. Amazing.

And when we had you on, there was some cra wasn't it there was some story in the news about like some some like Chinese like scientists that that were bringing some type of bioweapon around or at least working on it. So good to have you back with some more happy news. Yeah. Yeah.

I'd love to know the state of like what are the case studies that you're latching on to? uh you know in the early days of of Anderoll there was this narrative around the rising power of China and our decrepit uh military systems. People would talk about the failure of the or not the the delays with the F-35 program.

Uh do you have particular case studies and stories that you like to ground the the story of your company with? Yeah, absolutely. So when we're talking about biod defense broadly the big problem is asymmetry. So it is just so much easier, cheaper, and faster to make a pathogen than it is to make any kind of cure.

And that's just like at the heart of everything we're talking about. That was true before AI, but what's really changed is how some of these new AI capabilities are magnifying that type of asymmetry. It's two big ways that we're focused on in terms of the case studies you were saying. The first is more about uplift.

So it's how many people, how much technical skill set does it take to actually engineer a pathogen? And that's just dropping week over week. So we used to be worried about these sophisticated state sponsored programs. Um you can you can read what our folks in defense are focused on in uh Russia and North Korea.

Um now we can talk about like a couple students maybe at the grad level who have access to a lab and like that's probably going down to one or two as these capabilities expand. So like massive massively different landscape. The second side is just like how potentially lethal can these threats be?

So we're getting I think we have more technical difficulties. It's a technical difficulty day. It's Friday. The internet is slow, but you're back.

So, uh, please uh maybe maybe I can reframe the conversation, not to kind of just cut you off and restart, but uh people have been saying we need an anderal for bio for a while. Is that an appropriate moniker?

And maybe we could use the Anderoll example as understanding uh a little bit deeper on what you want to build because I think of Anderoll as very much, you know, separate from Palunteer, they're building hardware, they're building specific programs of record for the DoD, competing against the primes.

Are there companies that you're going to be competing with out of the out of the gate? How do you think about the shape of the business as it grows? Is this on our side? Are we having technical difficulties on our side today? It might be a Zoom Might be a Zoom thing. Is there a Is is there a ma major attack?

Uh let's uh let's flip over to the production team. What What do you guys have to say for yourselves? What's going on? I don't know. Is it AWS 2. 0? It could easily be us. I seem to be back now. Okay, we Yeah, I think we have uh I think we're back. I have one more chance at talking about uh the Android comparison.

Um I would say uh probably much closer to Palunteer than Android.

I mean one of one of the obvious ones is like what um what does our product look like and we're talking about software and how we bring like the the best frontier capabilities to both understand what a threat is and then very quickly design a countermeasure to it.

How do we take those things that are that are largely in academic labs emerging really quickly and put it into something that's operational that could actually react in the time as real-time data flows in and you actually need to design a countermeasure.

Um but in terms of the overall do we need private sector innovation in this space? Absolutely. Like the people in defense and health that are absolutely at the front lines of this keeping us safe now.

The pace of biotech innovation is so massively outpassing outpacing our ability to react to it that like we have to start bringing these types of tools um to really augment the defenses that we have today. Yeah. Question from the chat. Trey asks, "Madna designed the C19 vaccine in two days in clinical dev today.

The slow part is often validation, trials, manufacturing and access distribution. Is val solving for that for biodefense. Thanks Trey. Uh yes, I think a huge part of it is how how accurate you can make uh predictions that are coming from computational models.

How do this translate uh into clinical development translational? Can you actually have a really precise understanding of what these therapeutics look like as soon as you start designing them in silicone.

So that's a huge part of our focus is um as more and more generative methods for countermeasure design come online, how could we help the people that are designing those drugs really quickly understand whether it will be effective against whatever kind of evolution we're seeing uh in terms of the of the pathogen landscape.

I think on the the manufacturing and supply chain side, another massive problem when we think about overall biocurity for America, um it's not it's not the first challenge we're taking on, but it's certainly something we'll partner around in the future.

How do you think about um I don't know there's like uh like ISR versus like actual bombs or something in the Anderal context like like Palunteer might make a map of like where all the bad guys are and then Ander might be the one that builds the missile.

Um h uh how do you think about like does America have the ability to pull up a dashboard of every different strain of flu that is at LAX right now? Because I know LAX is like a famous petri dish of of you know you just like different flu and colds because everyone's traveling from all over.

Um, do we have the ability as a country to actually understand what's going on biologically across the country? Um, largely no. It's getting better. I think there's two dimensions to it.

So, a lot of the innovation we've seen in the last couple years is focused on do we even have like the lens like is the data even flowing in of what's uh circulating in LAX. I'm closer to JFK so that's the one that really hits home that I get worried about.

Um the part that we're focused on and what I think has to be the next step is how do you take those data inputs and make them actionable so you can do something with it. So pathogens aren't static. It's not like there is something today and that's what we need to worry about.

It's how is this changing which means that in 2 weeks what is the shape of this that we're going to have to hit. So a big part of what we're focused on is trying to understand these are the things that are emerging today.

how quickly do we know that there are threats and then what do we need to change in terms of the countermeasures that we have to be ready for what's ever coming. Um so really focused and I think that's where a lot of the palunteer analogy comes in. It's not you know data for data sake.

It's how do you actually pull that data into the decision-m process so that you can start seeing changes in operations. Um and that's what we're excited to do. That makes a ton of sense. Uh give us the fundraising news. What happened? What's coming out of stealth?

What uh well we are very proud to announce that we raised 30 million Uh, congratulations. Incredible. Who Who are the backers? Bunch of no names, right? You really had to scrape the bottom of the barrel. You had to put together rag tag group of you can barely call these guys venture capitalists.

Everyone wants to prevent bioweapons. What can I say? Um, no. It's a murderers row. You got a bunch of great uh a bunch of great firms in FFund. We do. We have Founders Fund and Lux. They've been with us from the beginning. Um, and then we just had OpenAI, uh, their startup front join in, help lead the round.

They're like, they have been ringing the alarm on, uh, what the bio the risk of some of these new frontier methods are for bio like way before anyone, and we're um, super excited to partner with them to try to stop it. Well, congratulations.

uh would love to have you back on the show when whenever the next announcement is, whenever the next uh progress point comes or whenever hopefully we don't have to be giving you a call when bad stuff happens.

We can just talk about and celebrate these you you'll be like a a good cornerback in the NFL and we won't hear about you because you will be defending us and we won't be calling you out. Perfect. We'll prevent the headline. Exactly. All right. Thanks a lot, guys. Thanks so much. Have a great rest of your day.

Uh let me tell you about eightleep. com. I put up a generational run last night. 98. I slept for like 10 hours. It was fantastic. Jordy, how'd you do? Did you 91? 91. How many hours did you actually sleep? Uh, let's pull it up. Uh, while we bring in our next guest. I slept 8 hours and 42 minutes.