Pharma AI startup Helical raises $10 million seed to build bio foundation model infrastructure

Helical, a London-based pharmaceutical AI startup, has raised $10 million in a seed funding round led by redalpine to develop infrastructure for biological foundation models used in drug discovery. The company builds platforms that connect AI systems with pharmaceutical research teams, aiming to compress drug discovery timelines from years to weeks. Founded by three Luxembourgish childhood friends with backgrounds in technology and medicine, Helical is already in production with multiple top-20 global pharmaceutical companies. Its publicly disclosed collaborations include work with Pfizer on predictive blood-based safety biomarkers and with Tanabe Pharma America on AI-driven target discovery for neurodegenerative diseases including ALS. The startup's platform consists of two main components: a Virtual Lab for biologists and translational scientists, and a Model Factory for machine learning engineers and data scientists. Both operate on shared data and models to produce consistent, auditable results that bridge the gap between AI outputs and scientific decision-making. Helical's thesis is that biological foundation models. AI systems trained on vast genomic, transcriptomic, and proteomic datasets. have crossed a quality threshold that makes computational hypothesis-testing meaningful in pharmaceutical research. However, the company identifies a persistent gap between model outputs and practical scientific applications. The seed round includes participation from Gradient, BoxGroup, and Frst, with notable angel investors including Aidan Gomez, CEO of Cohere; Clément Delangue, CEO of HuggingFace; and professional footballer Mario Goetze. The funding will support expansion across additional pharmaceutical programs and growth of Helical's science and engineering team. Daniel Graf, General Partner at redalpine, described the investment as a bet on a transition 'from siloed AI models to integrated virtual AI labs' as biological foundation models and general language reasoning converge. The round builds on a prior €2.2 million raise in 2024 from the same investor group.