Former Google AI expert raises $100mn for biotech start-up

A biotech start-up founded by a former Google artificial intelligence expert has raised $100mn from Silicon Valley heavyweights Nvidia and Andreessen Horowitz as the market for generative AI applications expands into pharmaceuticals. 

Palo Alto-based Inceptive plans to use the funds to develop new types of vaccines and drugs. It is designing “biological software” using the latest AI technology that was pioneered by the company’s founder Jakob Uszkoreit, who co-authored a paper that kick-started generative AI advances such as ChatGPT. 

Software programs code executable instructions on a computer, he said. “We want to do that but with cells in your body.”

Inceptive is one of a new generation of start-ups which have collectively raised billions of dollars to apply AI to drug development. It is part of a race by Big Pharma and investors to capitalise on a $50bn market opportunity for AI in the sector, according to a Morgan Stanley report.

The two-year-old start-up was last valued at $100mn in 2021 after it raised seed funding of $20mn. The latest round, which includes new investors such as Obvious Ventures, more than triples Inceptive’s valuation, according to a source close to the deal.  

The company has built an AI software platform that designs entirely unique molecules made of mRNA, the biological unit that Pfizer and BioNTech used to make their Covid-19 vaccines. Once Inceptive tests these in its labs, it licenses the molecules out to pharmaceutical companies to assemble and put through clinical trials. 

Inceptive said it was working with a large European pharmaceutical company, which is experimenting with the start-up’s molecules to develop a new infectious disease vaccine. The success of mRNA against Covid-19 has yet to be replicated in other vaccines.

“We want to provide this as a horizontal capability to any entity developing mRNA and later RNA medicines,” Uszkoreit said. “There are currently about 310 programs in flight, somewhere between pre-clinical and clinical trials.”

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

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

Uszkoreit, who spent most of his career at Google working on AI research, has always been interested in the biological applications of machine learning. When he was at the US tech giant, he explored the use of AI to predict the structure of human proteins. His work on transformers ultimately led to breakthrough research by Google DeepMind, the London-based AI unit, which invented AlphaFold, an algorithm designed to predict the structure of almost every known protein.

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

Uszkoreit co-wrote the transformers research paper first published in June 2017. Since then, all of its co-authors have left Google, primarily to found their own start-ups as the race for generative 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 start-ups in recent months. They include Israeli AI21 Labs, which is building its own large language model to compete with the likes of Google and OpenAI, and Aleph Alpha, a German competitor to OpenAI.

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

Nvidia declined to comment.

Additional reporting by Hannah Kuchler

This article has been amended to correct the age of Inceptive