Owkin is a Parisian AI biotech startup that uses machine learning to speed drug development and enhance clinical trials. It enables doctors, medical researchers, and pharmaceutical companies to identify new drug candidates and improve trial design by linking health data from typically siloed hospitals across the U.S. and Europe. The company emphasizes multimodal and rich biological data, including advanced spatial single-cell omics technologies. Owkin says it will use the new $80 million to support its data generation strategy across multiple therapeutic areas. The $80 million comprises a Series B-1 equity round and up-front fees for clinical trials, focused in part on cardiovascular drugs. The fresh funding brings total capital raised to over $300 million following a prior $180 million partnership with Sanofi that helped it reach unicorn status. Founded in 2016, Owkin aims to bring new drugs to market faster and improve patient outcomes through cutting-edge ML methods. Owkin is an AI biotech company that applies federated learning to train models across decentralized hospital and research center data without exchanging patient-level records. Its platform focuses on multimodal patient data, including histology and genomics, to identify biomarkers, therapeutic targets, and prognostic signals. Owkin aims to assemble what it calls the world’s most comprehensive histology and genomic cancer database and to power predictive models of treatment response. The company positions privacy-preserving collaboration at the center of its product and research network. Financially, Owkin has raised $324.1 million to date and now sits at a valuation above $1 billion following the latest investment. The company was founded in 2016 by Gilles Wainrib and Thomas Clozel and is based in Paris. Owkin builds an AI platform designed to create global, collaborative medical datasets by connecting data scientists, clinicians, academic researchers and pharmaceutical companies. The company emphasizes protecting patient data by keeping information within a hospital's local infrastructure. Its medical research ecosystem comprises four tools: Owkin Loop (the network), Owkin Connect (technology infrastructure), Owkin Studio (AI software) and Owkin Lab (expertise). Owkin positions itself to break down silos and augment research capabilities at scale, enabling discoveries of multimodal biomarkers and disease mechanisms that can affect drug development and clinical treatment plans. The startup has raised a total of $70 million to date following an $18 million Series A extension. Founded in 2016 and headquartered in New York City, Owkin says the funding and partnerships will help it strengthen its leadership in AI for biomedical research. Owkin operates a secure, privacy-focused virtual research environment called the Owkin Studio where data scientists, clinicians and pharma can access anonymized datasets and models to advance studies. In the platform, parties refine algorithms and predictive models to discover biomarkers, mechanisms of action and improve drug development while keeping underlying data protected. Owkin monetizes by enabling remote access to datasets for pharmaceutical companies and by licensing models developed by academic partners, creating additional revenue for research institutions. The company positions its technology as a solution to privacy and data‑security concerns in collaborative research and aims to improve patient outcomes. During the COVID-19 pandemic it launched the Covid-19 Open AI Consortium (COAI) to accelerate collaborative research, initially focusing on cardiovascular complications with CAPACITY (over 50 centers worldwide) and on patient outcomes, triage and immune-response prediction. Financially, Owkin raised $25 million in fresh financing as a Series A extension, bringing total capital raised to $55 million (the extended round was reported at $52 million). Owkin builds machine-learning technologies and infrastructure to enable medical and scientific discoveries, focused on predictive models that support drug development by forecasting treatment outcomes and disease evolution. The company develops interpretable models to discover multimodal biomarkers and works with clinicians to biologically validate those biomarkers. Owkin’s network enables federated learning, allowing researchers to train predictive models on heterogeneous real-world data while preserving patient privacy. Its predictive models are implemented in clinical trials through analysis enrichment, surrogate endpoints, patient stratification, patient selection, and high-value subgroup identification. The company intends to use the new funding to expand its partner network worldwide and deploy its flagship machine-learning platform to augment medical research. Owkin was founded in 2016 by Thomas Clozel, M.D., who serves as CEO, and is based in New York City.

Total raised

$337M

Funding rounds

11

Latest round

Series B

Latest activity

Jun 2022