Helical has secured $10 million in seed funding to advance its virtual AI lab designed to transform pharmaceutical research and development.
The round was led by redalpine, with participation from Gradient, BoxGroup, and Frst. Notable angel investors include Aidan Gomez, Clément Delangue, and Mario Götze.
Tackling Bottlenecks In Drug Discovery
Founded in 2024 by Rick Schneider, Maxime Allard, and Mathieu Klop, Helical is addressing a critical limitation in pharmaceutical R&D: the constrained capacity of physical experimentation.
While advances in biological foundation models have enabled large-scale computational research, translating these insights into reliable, real-world outcomes remains complex and resource-intensive.
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A Virtual AI Lab For Collaborative Research
Helical’s platform acts as a virtual AI lab, bridging the gap between computational predictions and biological validation.
It consists of two main components:
- Virtual Lab, designed for biologists and translational scientists
- Model Factory, built for machine learning engineers and data scientists
By enabling teams to collaborate on shared datasets, models, and results, the platform helps eliminate silos and supports more consistent, evidence-based decision-making across the drug discovery process.
Early Adoption By Global Pharma
The company is already working with several top 20 global pharmaceutical firms, applying its technology to use cases such as target identification, biomarker discovery, and therapeutic design.
These applications aim to shorten discovery timelines while opening up new therapeutic opportunities.
Improving Efficiency In A Costly Industry
With rising R&D costs and lengthy development cycles, the pharmaceutical industry faces increasing pressure to improve efficiency and reliability.
Helical aims to address this by turning computational insights into reproducible workflows that can be tested, validated, and scaled within real-world research environments.
Scaling The Platform
The newly raised funding will be used to deepen deployments with existing partners, expand collaborations with additional pharmaceutical companies, and enhance the platform’s data and validation layers to improve performance across multiple disease areas.
Co-founder Rick Schneider emphasised that the future of drug discovery lies not just in powerful models, but in systems that can operationalise them effectively—allowing teams to move from hypothesis to decision significantly faster.
About Helical
Helical is a biotechnology company building a virtual AI lab for pharmaceutical research. Its platform transforms biological foundation models into reproducible discovery systems, enabling scientists to test hypotheses in silico and accelerate drug development through improved collaboration between biology and machine learning teams.
