UK-based biotech startup Helical, which builds a virtual AI lab for faster AI-driven drug discovery, has raised $10 million in seed funding led by redalpine to scale its platform for pharmaceutical research.
- Founded in 2024 by Rick Schneider, Maxime Allard, and Mathieu Klop, Helical builds a virtual AI lab that turns biological foundation models into reproducible drug discovery workflows used by pharmaceutical R&D teams.
- Instead of relying on traditional lab-only experimentation, Helical lets researchers run in-silico experiments, meaning they can test biological hypotheses computationally at scale before validating them in the physical lab. Its platform is split into two core systems: a “Virtual Lab” for biologists to design and evaluate experiments, and a “Model Factory” for ML engineers to train, personalise, and deploy biology-focused AI models.
- The system works by connecting large biological foundation models with structured experimental workflows, allowing predictions to be tested, tracked, and validated against real biological evidence so teams can move from hypothesis to decision faster and more reproducibly.
Details of the deal
- The round was led by redalpine, with participation from Gradient, BoxGroup, Frst, and several angel investors including Aidan Gomez, Clément Delangue, Ivan Zhang, and Mario Götze.
"Helical is already working with a number of top-20 pharma companies, including a public collaboration with Pfizer on predictive safety biomarkers that compresses discovery timelines from years to weeks. The funding will accelerate their expansion to additional top-20 pharma organizations. Congratulations to Rick, Maxime, Mathieu, and the whole Helical team," redalpine's team, commented on LinkedIn.
- The new capital will be used to expand Helical’s platform across pharmaceutical clients, deepen deployments in drug discovery use cases, and further develop its “evidence layer” to make in-silico experiments more reliable, reproducible, and scalable across diseases and therapeutic areas.
