Arc Institute

Arc Institute is a U.S. nonprofit biomedical research organization headquartered in the Stanford Research Park in Palo Alto, California, founded in 2021. Its co-founders are Silvana Konermann (a Stanford biochemistry professor and its inaugural executive director), Patrick Hsu (bioengineering, UC Berkeley) and Patrick Collison (CEO of Stripe). The institute operates in partnership with three San Francisco Bay Area universities — Stanford, UC Berkeley and UCSF — and funds long-term, interdisciplinary research. In AI, Arc Institute is known for developing genomic foundation models, including the Evo and Evo 2 models, which treat DNA sequences as a "language" and apply machine learning to model and design biology. The institute's 2024 budget was approximately $82.8 million.