Artificial intelligence has enormous potential for disrupting drug discovery. And there’s a new startup who wants to build the foundational models to change the future of biotechnology.

‍What’s happening:‍

• Paris based artificial intelligence startup Bioptimus has come out of stealth mode and announced a $35M USD seed round
  
• The round was led by Sofinnova Partners
  

The big idea:‍

• Bioptimus is aiming to build the first true foundational artificial intelligence model for biology to unlock advancements in scientific research and drug discovery
  
• By training artificial intelligence models on vast amounts of biological data, Bioptimus believes they will be able to gain unique insight into complex aspects of human biology that have previously been too complex to throughly understand
  

Why it matters:‍

• Artificial intelligence is one of the most exciting areas of opportunity for biotechnology and drug discovery, largely due to the fact that artificial intelligence is able to analyze massive quantities of data to recognize patterns and unlock unique insights into biology that would be difficult for human beings to replicate
  

Going deeper:‍

• Founded by former scientists from Google DeepMind and Owkin, Bioptimus has attracted some of the brightest minds in biology, drug discovery and artificial intelligence to build out their technology
  
• Bioptimus plans to leverage partnerships to get access to high volumes of diverse data across molecules, cells, tissues and organs to train their foundational models with
  
• Bioptimus has secured computing power from Amazon Web Services to have leading edge GPUs available to train their artificial intelligence models at scale

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