Owkin, a predictive analytics company that aims to accelerates drug discovery and development, just landed $11 million in Series A funding. The round was led by Otium Venture with participation from Cathay Innovation, Plug and Play, and NJF Capital. This announcement brings the company’s total funding to $13.1 million.
“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,” Dr. Thomas Clozel, CEO and cofounder of OWKIN, said in a statement.
Owkin uses artificial intelligence and machine learning to organize, validate, predict and compare information. It then builds mathematical models and algorithms to interpret biostatistics data and patient profiles, according to their webpage.
The company’s flagship technology, called Socrates, uses machine learning and algorithms to create predictive models for drug development. The platform combines its algorithms to real-world data and integrates pre-trained models using proprietary privacy-preserving transfers and federated learning technologies. The technology also looks at molecular and imaging libraries to find complex biomarker patterns that cause disease, according to the statement.
Owkin aims to help the companies find biomarker patterns, design drugs, predict drug responses to design precision clinical trials and help the right medication get to the target demographic.
The company passed the proof-of-concept phase in 2016 and has since worked with large pharmaceutical and cancer centers in Europe. It has offices in New York and Paris.
“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,” Bruno Raillard, partner at Otium, said in a statement.
