Former Google AI expert raises $100 million for biotech startup

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A biotech startup founded by a former Google artificial intelligence expert has raised $100 million from Silicon Valley heavyweights Nvidia and Andreessen Horowitz as the market for AI applications brightens. to expand into pharmaceuticals.

Palo Alto-based Inceptive plans to use the funds to develop new vaccines and drugs. They are designing “biological software” using the latest AI technology pioneered by the company’s founder Jakob Uszkoreit, who co-authored a paper that kicked off general AI advances like ChatGPT.

Software programs encode instructions to execute on the computer, he said. “We want to do it but with the cells in your body.”

Inceptive is one of a new generation of startups that have raised billions of dollars to apply AI to drug development. This is part of a race by Big Pharma and investors to capitalize on a $50 billion market opportunity for AI in the field, as Morgan Stanley reports.

The 4-year-old startup was last valued at $100 million in 2021 after raising an initial $20 million in funding. The latest round of talks, which included new investors like Obvious Ventures, tripled Inceptive’s valuation, according to a person familiar with the deal.

The company has built an AI software platform that designs completely unique molecules made from mRNA, the biological unit that Pfizer and BioNTech use to make their Covid-19 vaccine. After Inceptive tests these molecules in its lab, it will license the molecules to pharmaceutical companies for assembly and clinical trials.

Inceptive says it is working with a major European pharmaceutical company, which is testing the startup’s molecules to develop a new infectious disease vaccine. The success of mRNA against Covid-19 has not been replicated in other vaccines.

“We wanted to offer this capability as a horizontal capability to any unit that is developing mRNA and later RNA drugs,” said Uszkoreit. “There are currently about 310 programs underway, between preclinical and clinical trials.”

He added that “conservative estimates” suggest more than 700 mRNA drugs will be developed by the end of the decade.

Other biotech companies that have announced drugs discovered or developed using AI tools include Exscientia, Verge Genomics, and Recursion Pharmaceuticals. However, much of the time and cost of drug development is spent in clinical trials, rather than designing molecules.

Uszkoreit, who spent most of his career at Google researching AI, has always been interested in biological applications of machine learning. While working at the US tech giant, he explored the use of AI to predict the structure of human proteins. His transformer work eventually led to groundbreaking work by Google DeepMind, the London-based AI unit that invented AlphaFold, an algorithm designed to predict structure of almost any known protein.

“We want to maximize the positive impact of this kind of work in AI,” he said.

Uszkoreit is a co-author of a research paper on transformers that was first published in June 2017. Since then, all of its co-authors have left Google, mainly to start a startup. their own as the race for creative AI talent heats up globally.

NVentures, Nvidia’s venture capital arm, is one of Inceptive’s new investors and has backed a number of AI-focused startups in recent months. These include Israel’s AI21 Lab, which is building its own massive language model to compete with Google and OpenAI, and Aleph Alpha, a German competitor to OpenAI.

Nvidia recently invested $50 million in another AI-powered drug discovery platform, Recursion, based in Utah. The company says Inceptive’s funding from NVentures is an equity investment but also gives it access to some of Nvidia’s most advanced computing platforms, including its latest chips.

Nvidia declined to comment.

Additional reporting by Hannah Kuchler