NEW YORK--(BUSINESS WIRE)--OWKIN, a predictive analytics company that utilizes transfer learning to accelerate drug discovery and development, today announced a $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 one 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, Ph.D. and Thomas Clozel, M.D., 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 which 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 last 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, M.D., CEO and Co-Founder of OWKIN.
Denis Barrier, co-founder and CEO of Cathay Innovation, concluded: “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.”
More information on OWKIN can be found at: www.owkin.com.
Connect with OWKIN
About OWKIN
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.
About Otium Venture
Otium is a seed VC fund with €200M under management, investing in early-stage startups (from €500,000 to €5M). Otium bases its investment thesis on the major technological and societal changes that are transforming economies and people, while also contributing to the emergence of the initiative-focused creative society.
The fund is organized into two investment teams:
- Otium Venture is on the lookout for the startups that are making radical bets with automation and decentralization.
- Otium Brands focuses on backing the new products and services of the real economy.
Since its creation, Otium has invested more than €60 million in 23 startups, including PayFit, Comet, Doctrine, Feed, OhMyCream and Même. For more information, please visit: https://otium.fr/
About Cathay Innovation
Cathay Innovation is a global venture capital fund, created in affiliation with Cathay Capital Private Equity. It was founded around the shared conviction that supporting digital entrepreneurs by providing them with a platform bridging 3 continents – North America, Europe and China – constitutes a particularly powerful value-creation strategy. As a multi-stage fund, Cathay Innovation partners with visionary entrepreneurs, committed to driving change through technology. Cathay Innovation has offices in San Francisco, Paris, Beijing, and Shanghai.
Follow Cathay Innovation on Twitter (@Cathayinnov) and on our website (cathayinnovation.com)
