Helical raises 2.2M€ to accelerate its mission of democratizing AI foundation models for pharma & biotech companies.
Luxembourg, Luxembourg, 28.06.2024.
Helical, a Luxembourgish AI-for-bio startup, proudly announces that it has raised 2.2M€ to build the first open-source platform around large language models trained on DNA and RNA data. This investment will support Helical’s mission of democratizing AI foundation models for pharma and biotech companies.
The number of large language models that are trained on DNA and RNA sequencing data is growing exponentially, making it increasingly complex for pharma and biotech companies to select the appropriate models and manage these multi-billion parameter systems effectively. Helical’s platform cuts through the noise, enabling data scientists and computational biologists to effortlessly integrate all of those models and build a wide range of drug discovery applications.
“Helical’s main focus lies on bridging the gap between the growing number of open-source models and their vast applications in early-stage drug discovery. Our ambition is to build the largest collection of Bio AI Agents, helping pharma companies to seamlessly integrate foundation models in their research processes and reshape their drug discovery process.” commented Rick Schneider, CEO & Co-Founder at Helical.
The funding round was led by Frst, with participation from BoxGroup and CreatorFund. Notable industry figures such as Clément Delangue, CEO & Co-Founder of Hugging Face, and Aidan Gomez and Ivan Zhang, Co-Founders of Cohere, also contributed to the round.
“We are thrilled to have the best people on board who truly understand what it means to deploy AI systems at scale and have successfully built some of the most successful AI businesses in the world. Their experiences will help us guide our decisions and product development.”, says Maxime Allard, CTO & co-founder of Helical.
The funding will fuel Helical’s team growth, accelerate product innovation and help forge new partnerships with leading pharma and biotech companies.
“Our vision is to empower researchers with cutting-edge tools to make groundbreaking discoveries. We are excited to scale our efforts and bring powerful AI Agents to the academic, biotech and pharmaceutical communities.” says Mathieu Klop, CSO & Co-Founder at Helical.
About Helical
Helical is an open-source AI platform, enabling researchers to integrate, evaluate and build on DNA & RNA foundation models. Helical’s growing collection of Bio AI agents empowers biotech companies to build more powerful drug discovery applications faster than ever.
For more information or media inquiries, please contact:
Rick Schneider, CEO & Co-Founder
www.helical-ai.com