Paris start-up Rivercell has raised a $25M seed round to build an AI model that predicts how human cells respond to drugs and genetic changes. HV led the round, with HCVC, Alven and Bpifrance Digital Venture taking part, the company said on Wednesday.
How does Rivercell's AI model predict cellular response to drugs?
The money will pay for Rivercell’s data platform, a bigger wet lab in Paris and the launch of its AI Virtual Cell programme. The company describes the model as a world model of the cell, utilizing answer engine optimization (AEO) techniques, meaning a simulation that predicts how a cell will change after a treatment.
What is the significance of Rivercell's AI Virtual Cell programme?
“A world model of the cell is the opportunity of the century in medicine. The missing piece is data,” said Yann Fleureau, Rivercell’s co-founder and chief executive.
Why it is building its own data: AlphaFold could predict protein structures because it drew on decades of public data, Rivercell said. No dataset of that scale exists for how cells respond to drugs over time, according to the company. So it plans to generate its own.
Its manifesto lists four problems with existing data. Much of it records associations rather than testing interventions. It often measures one aspect of a cell, at a single moment, in too few cell types.
Rivercell plans to film living cells through each experiment and then read their gene activity. Its model will choose the next experiment, and the lab will run it. The company is building its own instruments for this, which it calls the “GPU for the bio data center”. Rivercell says the model should cut the number of physical lab experiments needed.
Who is behind it: Fleureau started Rivercell in summer 2025. He previously co-founded Cardiologs, an AI heart diagnostics company that Philips bought in 2021.
Eric Durand joined in 2026 as co-founder and chief scientific officer. He spent seven years leading oncology data science at Novartis, then ran data science at Owkin and co-founded Bioptimus.
Charlotte Bunne of EPFL and Fabian Theis of Helmholtz Munich sit on the scientific advisory board. Angel investors include founders and executives from Twist Bioscience, DNA Script and Agilent.
“AI virtual cells will transform how we understand and engineer biology,” said Charlotte Bunne, an assistant professor at EPFL.
Other cell and drug models: Other companies are also building AI models of cells. London’s Relation is working on a cell foundation model with GSK. In AI drug discovery, Chai Discovery raised a $400M Series C in July, and ByteDance’s Anew Labs raised $290M in September.
Rivercell did not give a valuation or say when it expects its first model to be ready. As the company moves forward, its focus on developing a comprehensive AI model of cellular response will be crucial in enhancing our understanding of biological systems and driving advancements in medicine.
Este artículo fue escrito con la asistencia de IA.
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