The Stanford professor behind an FDA-cleared cardiac AI wants $1 billion for his next company

Summary: Stanford professor James Zou is reportedly raising approximately $100 million at a valuation targeting $1 billion for a startup called Human Intelligence that applies AI to research on the human body, according to Bloomberg. Zou’s research includes an FDA-cleared cardiac AI (EchoNet), a Nature-published Virtual Lab that designed novel nanobodies, and a Virtual Biotech multi-agent framework that annotated 56,000 clinical trials. The deal specifics are single-source, but the researcher’s credentials are among the strongest in AI-biology, and the funding environment, $11 billion into AI drug discovery in Q1 2026 alone, is historically accommodating.

James Zou has spent the past decade building AI systems that do science. His Virtual Lab, published in Nature in July 2025, assembled a team of large language model agents led by an AI principal investigator that designed 92 novel nanobody binders against SARS-CoV-2 variants, two of which showed improved binding in experimental ...