OWKIN Closes $11-Million Financing for AI in Drug Development

OWKIN, a predictive analytics company that utilizes transfer learning to accelerate drug discovery and development, recently announced an $11-million Series A funding round, led by Otium Venture with participation from Cathay Innovation, Plug and Play, and NJF Capital, bringing the company’s total financing to $13.1 million in 1 year. OWKIN’s Series A funding round demonstrates the market’s appetite for a digital technology-driven approach to clinical development and medical research. OWKIN will use the funds to scale its innovative platform, OWKIN Socrates, cultivate high-value partnerships with leading healthcare organizations, and fuel internal growth.

Bruno Raillard, partner at Otium Venture, will join OWKIN’s Board of Directors, which currently includes co-founders Gilles Wainrib, PhD, and Thomas Clozel, MD, and NJF Capital founder Nicole Junkermann.

“We firmly believe that OWKIN is poised to transform how the healthcare community empowers its technology with transfer and federated learning, the next evolution of artificial intelligence, to generate critical insights that will serve as a foundation for discovering and developing the therapies of tomorrow. Otium seeks to partner with innovative companies building novel solutions that address critical problems facing our industry,” said Bruno Raillard, partner at Otium.

“OWKIN’s comprehensive platform improves healthcare delivery by building algorithms that enable researchers and clinicians to analyze vast patient datasets and predict treatment outcomes in real time. We look forward to collaborating with Dr. Clozel, Dr. Wainrib, and the exceptional OWKIN team to apply this technology more broadly and support their commercial growth.”

OWKIN’s flagship platform, OWKIN Socrates, is intended for pharmaceutical researchers at the preclinical and clinical trial phase, as well as hospital physician-researchers. OWKIN Socrates uses machine learning-based modeling to analyze molecular and imaging libraries as well as patient datasets to uncover complex biomarker patterns that cause disease. Unlike other platforms, OWKIN Socrates uses transfer learning – a domain of artificial intelligence that focuses on the ability for a machine algorithm to improve learning capacities on one given dataset through previous exposure to a different one.

“I am proud of the substantial progress OWKIN has made over the past year, including building trust with our pharmaceutical and hospital partners. We have created the right technology that is respectful of a patient’s data privacy while also allowing every user to safely transform any dataset into a unique discovery, which can help accelerate the discovery of new underlying disease mechanisms and the development of new therapies to treat it,” said Thomas Clozel, MD, CEO and Co-Founder of OWKIN.

Denis Barrier, Co-founder and CEO of Cathay Innovation, added “We are proud to participate in this major step in OWKIN’s development as we have been following companies relying on artificial intelligence closely since the launch of our fund dedicated to innovation. We were impressed by OWKIN’s technological capacities, which are very likely to revolutionize medical research and drugs discovery. We’ll make sure to support their international development through our network on three continents.”

OWKIN is a predictive analytics company that utilizes transfer learning to accelerate drug discovery and development. OWKIN’s proprietary platform, OWKIN Socrates, uses machine learning-based modeling to analyze molecular, imaging libraries and patient datasets to uncover complex biomarker patterns that cause disease. OWKIN partners with leading pharmaceutical companies including Amgen and Actelion and the company has programs in development with Institut Curie, Centre Leon Berard, and Saint Louis Hospital. For more information, visit www.owkin.com and follow @OWKINscience on Twitter.