Tekedia Capital is excited to announce our investment in Exonic, an unsupervised Biological AI company pioneering a new generation of biological foundation models focused on heterogeneous, unstructured, and noisy biological datasets.
Why did we make this investment? As always, I begin with business models, and consider two scenarios.
Scenario A: Hire ten world-class movie producers and ask them to create 200 short-form videos over two years for your digital media platform.
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Scenario B: Open a platform to tens of thousands of creators worldwide and use AI to discover, rank, and distribute the best content daily.
In the year 2000, Scenario A would have been a sensible business model. Computing power was expensive, AI was primitive, and the infrastructure required to evaluate millions of content interactions in real time did not exist at scale. Human judgment had to substitute for computational intelligence.
Today, Scenario B wins.
Why? Because intelligence compounds when you can learn from everyone. The probability of discovering a breakout hit becomes dramatically higher when you allow thousands or millions of contributors to participate. AI can then identify patterns, surface quality, and continuously optimize distribution. The result is a system that becomes smarter with scale.
This explains why TikTok became a superior business model to Quibi. Quibi relied on a small group of highly accomplished professionals, including industry legends such as Jeffrey Katzenberg and former eBay CEO Meg Whitman. Yet the model was constrained by the insights and decisions of a limited number of people. TikTok, by contrast, leveraged the creativity of the world and used algorithms to discover value wherever it emerged. As I noted years ago, virality compounds; human curation alone does not.
That same principle informs our investment in Exonic. Biology is generating enormous quantities of data across laboratories, research institutions, healthcare systems, genomic repositories, and scientific publications. Much of that information is noisy, fragmented, unstructured, and difficult for traditional models to interpret. Exonic’s thesis is that the next breakthroughs in synthetic biology, cell-type targeting, biological manufacturing, and life sciences will come not from a narrow set of curated datasets, but from learning across the broadest possible landscape of biological knowledge. In essence, Exonic wants to mine ideas from the world.
By combining insights from diverse biological sources with proprietary models and infrastructure, the company is building foundational AI systems for the emerging synthetic DNA age. Just as the internet unlocked the world’s information and AI unlocked the world’s content, biological AI may unlock the world’s biological intelligence.
Good People, the most powerful systems of the future will not merely use knowledge. They will aggregate, synthesize, and learn from knowledge generated by everyone. That is the promise of Exonic, and that is why Tekedia Capital wrote the cheque.
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