Ian Shi

Ian Shi is the Co-Founder of Blank Bio, an AI-driven computational biotechnology startup based in San Francisco, California. He recently earned a PhD in Computer Science from the University of Toronto and previously worked as an early employee at Deep Genomics, alongside completing formal research and software engineering internships at Amazon and Pinterest. At Blank Bio, a three-employee company participating in the Y Combinator Summer 2025 batch, Shi develops highly efficient mRNA foundation models. His recent open-source models, which are currently utilized by major pharmaceutical companies like Sanofi and GSK, were pre-trained on just four GPUs yet consistently outperform competitor systems trained on thousands of H100 chips. Shi's current focus centers on scaling these computational biology models and collaborating with the Arc Institute to advance RNA therapeutics, biomarker discovery, and advanced clinical trial patient stratification.