{"entity":{"id":"exai-bio","kind":"company","name":"Exai Bio","aka":[],"tldr":"Exai Bio is building blood tests that look for small pieces of RNA made only by tumours, rather than tumour DNA, and uses artificial intelligence to find cancer early from a routine blood draw.","summary":"Exai Bio, based in Palo Alto, California, develops an RNA-based liquid biopsy platform built on orphan non-coding RNAs (oncRNAs), small RNA species largely absent from normal tissue but abundant in tumours, first described by co-founder Hani Goodarzi's UCSF laboratory in Nature Medicine in 2018. The company sequences cell-free RNA from plasma and applies generative AI models to detect and characterise cancer, an approach it argues captures active tumour biology rather than relying on rare ctDNA mutations. Early detection data in breast cancer were presented at the San Antonio Breast Cancer Symposium in 2023 and AACR in 2024, and a Nature Communications paper on the platform appeared in November 2024. Dave Daly became chief executive in July 2024. The company raised a $67.5 million Series A in December 2021 co-led by Section 32 and Casdin Capital; no later round is disclosed on its site.","asOf":"2026-09-10","links":[{"label":"Official website","url":"https://www.exai.bio/"},{"label":"Series A press release (Dec 2021)","url":"https://www.exai.bio/news/exai-bio-secures-67-5-million-series-a"},{"label":"News page","url":"https://www.exai.bio/news"}],"tags":[],"related":[],"cancers":[],"sections":["early-detection","diagnostics"],"technologies":["liquid-biopsy","rna-seq","mced"],"targets":[],"drugs":[],"companies":[],"institutions":[],"pathways":[],"terms":[],"trials":[],"people":[],"bottlenecks":[],"keyPapers":[],"journals":[],"dependsOn":[],"notes":["Series A release dateline is San Francisco; current website address is Palo Alto. Founding year not sourced. Breast cancer data are not attributed to a subtype so no cancer id is tagged."],"hq":"Palo Alto, CA","country":"US","companyType":"diagnostics","website":"https://www.exai.bio/","stage":"startup","investors":["section-32","casdin-capital"],"funding":[{"round":"Series A","year":2021,"amountUsd":67500000,"source":"https://www.exai.bio/news/exai-bio-secures-67-5-million-series-a","note":"Co-led by Section 32 and Casdin Capital with Two Sigma Ventures, December 2021."}]},"route":"/companies/exai-bio/","neighbours":{"section":[{"id":"diagnostics","kind":"section","name":"Diagnostics & Biomarkers","route":"/fronts/diagnostics/"},{"id":"early-detection","kind":"section","name":"Early Detection & Screening","route":"/fronts/early-detection/"}],"technology":[{"id":"liquid-biopsy","kind":"technology","name":"Liquid biopsy (ctDNA)","route":"/technologies/liquid-biopsy/"},{"id":"mced","kind":"technology","name":"Multi-cancer early detection (MCED)","route":"/technologies/mced/"},{"id":"rna-seq","kind":"technology","name":"RNA sequencing & expression profiling","route":"/technologies/rna-seq/"}],"company":[{"id":"casdin-capital","kind":"company","name":"Casdin Capital","route":"/companies/casdin-capital/"},{"id":"section-32","kind":"company","name":"Section 32 (S32)","route":"/companies/section-32/"}]}}