- US-French health startup Owkin has raised a $25 million funding round led by BPI France Large Venture, with co-investments from Cathay Innovation and MACSF.
- Previous investors such as GV, F-Prime Capital, and Eight Roads also joined the round which serves as an extension to the company's Series A.
- "We wanted to extend the round because it gives us a good opportunity to scale the business and our Covid-19 consortium," Thomas Clozel, cofounder and CEO of Owkin, told Business Insider in an interview. "It was a good match between funding being available and timing, we're proud to work with three new investors."
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Health startup Owkin has raised a $25 million funding round led by BPI France Large Venture, with co-investments
from Cathay Innovation and MACSF.
Owkin is a French-American startup that deploys AI and federated learning for medical research. Pharmaceutical companies can use an algorithm to search rival companies' data without revealing any commercial advantage by using Owkin's blockchain platform.
Previous investors such as GV, F-Prime Capital, and Eight Roads also joined the round which serves as an extension to the company's Series A. The round serves as an extension to the company's Series A round and takes its total funding to $43.1 million.
"We wanted to extend the round because it gives us a good opportunity to scale the business and our COVID-19 consortium," Thomas Clozel, cofounder and CEO of Owkin, told Business Insider in an interview. "It was a good match between funding being available and timing, we're proud to work with three new investors."
Owkin launched the COVID-19 Open AI Consortium (COAI) during the pandemic. It combines the company's platform and technology to help advance collaborative research around the novel coronavirus. "You'd think that COVID would lower the risk of silos," Clozel added. "But in some ways it's the opposite, everyone wants to be first, you don't even need to peer review scientific papers to get into media. Our consortium is about merging intelligence not data sets and is helping to answer specific questions."
The company, which currently has 98 staff, is planning on using the funding to expand its headcount and continue to build partnerships with academic and research institutions. "We need more money to build more software and our AI tools which are our superpowers to find solutions in clinical science," Clozel said.
Check out Owkin's pitch deck below:
