A Berkeley startup aiming to build what it calls a "virtual immune system" has secured $8 million in seed funding, the company announced October 8. Dimension Capital led the round for Onyx Bio, with participation from Haystack, Refactor Capital, Standard, Robot Ventures and others. The company, founded earlier this year, declined to disclose its valuation.
The premise is ambitious. Onyx collects exhaustive biological data from study participants through at-home sample collection, then layers that information with clinical records to model how individual immune systems respond to infection, inflammation and treatment over time. The goal is to accelerate precision medicine for autoimmune diseases and speed drug development.
What Onyx is assembling goes well beyond standard blood work. Participants provide samples for single-cell RNA sequencing with T-cell and B-cell receptor tracking, chromatin accessibility measurements, roughly 1,000 plasma proteins analyzed through proximity extension assays, targeted metabolomics and genomics. All of it gets linked to longitudinal clinical records. The company then makes this data available to researchers hunting for disease subtypes, biomarkers or better ways to stratify patients in clinical trials.
Nearly 1,000 people have signed up for Onyx's paid studies, which focus on autoimmune diseases and immune aging, according to the company. There's no travel required. Participants in the immune aging cohort need to be either 18 to 30 or 50 to 75 years old. They're compensated for each visit, and the work is overseen by an ethics board.
Whether that's enough to build a truly representative dataset remains to be seen. Recruiting diverse patient populations for longitudinal studies has long challenged precision medicine efforts, and at-home collection introduces its own variables around sample quality and consistency.
Co-founder and CEO Roger Chen spent time as a principal at O'Reilly AlphaTech Ventures and holds a PhD in electrical engineering from UC Berkeley. Co-founder and CTO Amit Lakhani studied at UC Berkeley from 2007 to 2012 and left Planet roughly a year before launching Onyx, according to his LinkedIn profile. Chen has said publicly that the team believes AI is essential to making biological complexity tractable.
The funding comes as multiple well-capitalized companies stake out similar terrain. Immunai, based in New York, has raised close to $270 million and expanded its collaboration with AstraZeneca in May 2026. That partnership makes Immunai eligible to receive up to $37.5 million over 2026–2027, according to a press release. Enable Medicine, another player in the space, licenses what it describes as an AI-ready index of clinical, spatial, cellular and molecular data spanning more than 20 disease areas.
An SEC filing executed by Chen shows three investors in the roughly $8 million offering, though the document lists a first sale date of February 13, 2026, an apparent discrepancy with the company's October announcement. Ice Miller LLP served as legal counsel on the financing and related collaborations, the law firm noted in a LinkedIn post from October.
Onyx lists between two and 10 employees on LinkedIn. The company has posted openings this year for a senior research associate and clinical research coordinator. It operates from an office on Bancroft Way in Berkeley, a short walk from campus. In its October announcement, the team said the seed proceeds will support platform growth, expand studies and help researchers and biopharma companies "turn what it reveals into better medicines."
The pitch hinges on a wager that more data, collected more frequently, from more angles, will unlock patterns invisible in traditional clinical trials or one-time snapshots. That theory has attracted substantial venture interest across the computational biology sector, though translating multiomics data into clinical insights has proven slower and more complex than many early forecasts suggested.
