Tags: biotech

London-based AI startup Helical announced a $10 million seed round led by redalpine, with participation from Gradient, BoxGroup and Frst. Angel investors include Cohere CEO Aidan Gomez and HuggingFace CEO Clément Delangue. The funding will fuel expansion of Helical’s Virtual Lab and Model Factory tools, which aim to bridge the gap between large biological foundation models and day‑to‑day drug‑discovery workflows. Helical already counts several top‑20 pharmaceutical companies among its customers, including a public collaboration with Pfizer. Ler mais

Anthropic completed a $400 million stock purchase of Coefficient Bio, a stealth AI biotech firm founded by former Genentech researchers Samuel Stanton and Nathan C. Frey. The acquisition adds a ten‑person team focused on accelerating drug discovery to Anthropic’s health and life‑science division, following the company’s October launch of Claude for Life Sciences, an AI tool aimed at scientific research. Ler mais

Breakout Ventures has closed a $114 million Fund III aimed at early‑stage startups that apply artificial intelligence to scientific fields such as biology and chemistry. The firm, which spun out of a Thiel Foundation grant program, has already written checks to three companies and plans to invest in at least 20 companies, with check sizes ranging from $500,000 to $5 million. Limited partners include The Kraft Group, Pinegrove Venture Partners and S‑Cubed Capital. Managing Director Lindy Fishburne emphasized the firm’s focus on founders who can unlock complex scientific problems with AI. Ler mais

A senior Google executive cautioned that AI startups built solely around wrapping large language models or aggregating multiple models face a bleak outlook. He emphasized the need for deep, differentiated intellectual property and warned that merely layering a user interface on top of existing models no longer attracts market interest. While praising ventures that embed unique value, he highlighted opportunities in developer platforms, direct‑to‑consumer tools, biotech and climate technology, suggesting that the next wave of successful AI firms will be those that create genuine, specialized moats. Ler mais

Onepot AI, founded by Daniil Boiko and Andrei Tyrin, has raised $13 million in a seed round led by Fifty Years, with participation from Khosla Ventures, Speedinvest, OpenAI co‑founder Wojciech Zaremba and Google chief scientist Jeff Dean. The company tackles a long‑standing bottleneck in drug discovery—chemical synthesis—by pairing a dedicated lab (POT‑1) with an AI‑driven organic chemist named Phil. Boiko and Tyrin aim to compress months‑long synthesis timelines into days, expanding the design space for biotech and pharma partners while building a second lab in San Francisco. Ler mais

Nephrogen, a biotech startup founded by Stanford graduate Demetri Maxim, is developing an AI‑driven delivery system for gene‑editing medicines aimed at treating polycystic kidney disease (PKD). After a personal battle with PKD, Maxim combined insights from a 2021 Nature study with advanced screening to create a vehicle that is claimed to be 100 times more efficient than existing FDA‑approved options. The company, a finalist in TechCrunch Disrupt’s Startup Battlefield, is seeking a $4 million seed round to move its delivery platform and a companion drug into clinical trials, potentially as early as 2027. Ler mais

Neuralink plans to start a new U.S. clinical trial in October that will test an implant designed to convert users' thoughts into written text. Conducted under an FDA investigational device exemption, the study aims to help individuals with speech impairments communicate directly via brain activity. The company already runs five other trials worldwide and envisions broader applications, including real‑time interaction with AI models and potential use by healthy users within a few years. Ler mais