Helical, a biotechnology
company developing a virtual AI lab for pharmaceutical research and
development, has raised $10 million in seed funding. The round was led by
redalpine, with participation from Gradient, BoxGroup, and Frst, alongside
angel investors including Aidan Gomez (CEO of Cohere), Clement Delangue (CEO of
Hugging Face), and Mario Götze.
Founded in early 2024 by
Rick Schneider, Maxime Allard, and Mathieu Klop, Helical was established to
address a key bottleneck in drug discovery: the limited throughput of physical
experimentation. While biological foundation models enable scientists to test
hypotheses computationally, many pharmaceutical teams still face challenges in
translating model outputs into reproducible and actionable scientific
decisions.
Helical aims to bridge
this gap by providing an application layer that integrates computational
predictions with biological validation, enabling more efficient and
collaborative research workflows.
Its platform functions as
a virtual AI lab, designed to transform bio foundation models into reproducible
discovery systems. It features two interconnected components: the Virtual Lab,
tailored for biologists and translational scientists, and the Model Factory,
built for machine learning engineers and data scientists. By operating on
shared data, models, and results, the platform facilitates collaboration across
traditionally siloed teams and supports evidence-based decision-making
throughout the discovery process.
According to Rick
Schneider, co-founder of Helical, meaningful drug discovery is driven by
systems that combine and operationalise model insights rather than by models
alone.
Pharma teams need a
system that turns foundation models into workflows scientists can run,
validate, and defend. We built Helical to make in-silico science reproducible
at pharma scale, so teams can go from hypothesis to decision in days instead of
months.
Helical is working with
several top-20 global pharmaceutical companies. Across applications such as
target identification, biomarker discovery, and therapeutic design, the
platform has supported significant reductions in discovery timelines and
facilitated expansion into additional therapeutic areas.
Operating within an
industry characterised by rising research and development costs and extended
timelines, Helical seeks to enhance the efficiency and reliability of drug
discovery.
The newly secured funding
will be used to deepen deployments across therapeutic areas with existing
clients, expand engagement with additional pharmaceutical organisations, and
further develop the platform’s evidence layer to improve performance across diseases.