Chris Raggio

Chris Raggio is a co-founder of Biotic, the non-profit building open infrastructure for synthetic cell engineering. An engineer and physician by training, he helped start Biotic out of a conviction that biology’s greatest opportunity is to become something we can engineer deliberately, and that the foundational tools for that future should be built in the open.

“Biology’s greatest opportunity is to become something we can engineer deliberately.”

He began in computer science and worked as a software engineer, which taught him to approach problems the way an engineer does: break them down, understand the parts, and build them back up. He went on to earn his medical degree from the University of Mississippi and train in psychiatry. Practicing medicine left him struck by how much of the field still rests on observation and trial and error — diagnoses made without objective tools, and treatments chosen by what had worked before rather than from a clear understanding of the underlying biology. He came to believe that medicine, and biology more broadly, advances too often by accident, and that its greatest unrealized potential is to put that progress on an engineering foundation.

That conviction led him to invest. Through his family office, Federov, he has backed early-stage science and technology he believed was undervalued relative to its potential, often taking contrarian positions well before consensus, including an early investment in Bitcoin. His focus increasingly centered on synthetic biology: he was an early investor in the synthetic biology company Avery Bio, which he later acquired, and a regular presence in the field’s community, including the SynBioBeta conferences.

His path to Biotic began with Drew Endy, who walked him through his Stanford lab and described, almost in passing, the idea of an operating system for biology. The phrase captured something Chris had been circling for years. When he learned of Kate Adamala’s work on synthetic cells, and that foundational research of this kind struggled to find conventional funding, he chose to help start the organization that became Biotic.

He sees his role as a steward rather than a spokesperson: supporting Kate, Drew, and the wider team, and helping ensure the technology develops as shared, open infrastructure rather than something controlled by any single lab or interest. He believes the field is at a turning point, and that the shared infrastructure beneath it will matter as much as any single breakthrough.