Bioptimus raises $41 million to develop a ‘GPT for biology’

A new French AI startup has raised $41 million to develop a foundational AI model for biology.

As well as ChatGPT by OpenAI has taken the world by storm for a super-intelligent generative AI tool capable of natural language conversation in text form, Bioptimus It takes that basic concept but trains its model specifically for downstream biological applications—something that comes with its own unique set of challenges, given that the necessary clinical training data tends to be sensitive, and not publicly available.

Co-founder and CEO of Bioptimus Jean-Philippe Vert says the company seeks to develop a greater understanding of biology by learning how it works from raw data covering molecules to entire organisms. This, he says, will allow scientists and researchers to simulate the biological world to “predict disease outcomes” and develop more effective treatments. And it’s this simulation that Vert says makes his technology somewhat similar to what ChatGPT’s underlying model is all about.

“Beyond pharmaceuticals, this model will unlock limitless possibilities in many other industries, driving biological discoveries in ways we are only beginning to imagine,” Vert said in a declaration. “Essentially, it’s like the GPT of biology, but instead of generating text, we simulate biology.”

France appeared as something of a hotbed for AI startupswith generative AI companies across the country securing the lion’s share of the funding like last year. Mega funding rounds include 640 million dollars of Mistral AI slice, “H” securing $220 millionand Face hugged closing a $235 million investment — all in the last 18 months.

Bioptimus, for its part, was founded only last year, but already raised a $35 million seed round. That it has now raised a total grant of $76 million, less than a year since its founding, is not only a testament to the current AI hype, but also to the backgrounds of the six co-founders of Bioptimus. Chief Technology Officer (CTO) Rodolphe Jenattonfor example, he was previously a senior research scientist at Amazon and Google. Vert, meanwhile, is not only co-founder and CEO of Bioptimus, but is also the official R&D head of Owkina French unicorn and yet another AI-infused biotech startup with backers including GV.

This dual role suggests the origins of Bioptimus. Owkin leverages artificial intelligence and machine learning to accelerate drug discovery, and has built a number of partnerships with leading biopharmaceutical companies. As part of this work, Owkin has also accumulated a ton of multimodal patient data, which is what Bioptimus will use to form its foundational model.

So rather than creating a tangential unit within Owkin that was focused on the foundation models, it just made more sense to create a separate entity.

“Building biology (foundation models) is not part of Owkin’s roadmap, but Owkin supports and is willing to partner with a company like Bioptimus,” Vert explained to TechCrunch in an interview last year past “Large-scale training (foundation models) requires significant resources in terms of data volume, computing power and the breadth of data modalities that are easier to unlock as a specific entity. As a “pure player” in foundation models, Bioptimus is best configured to do this.”

In the intervening months, Bioptimus launched H-Optimus-0, an open source foundation model for pathology, which has been trained on millions of images to help in the research and diagnosis of diseases, such as cancer.

Bioptimus’ latest cash injection was led by American venture capital firm Cathay Innovation, with participation from Sofinnova Partners, Bpifrance, Andera Partners, Hitachi Ventures, Boom Capital Ventures, Pomifer Capital, Sunrise and several angel investors .

The company said it would use the funding to enhance its AI platform with a more diverse range of data sources covering wider therapeutic areas, while also looking to build more partnerships with the pharmaceutical and biotech sectors.