Helical secures $10 million in seed funding to transform biological foundation models into systems.

      The startup founded in Luxembourg is already producing for several top-20 global pharmaceutical companies, including a public partnership with Pfizer. Its initial funding round of $10 million is led by redalpine, with contributions from the CEOs of Cohere and HuggingFace among the angel investors.

      Helical, a London-based pharmaceutical AI company established by three childhood friends from Luxembourg, has secured $10 million in a seed funding round led by redalpine, with support from Gradient, BoxGroup, and Frst. Noteworthy angel investors include Aidan Gomez, CEO of Cohere; Clément Delangue, CEO of HuggingFace; and professional football player Mario Goetze.

      This funding will facilitate Helical’s expansion into additional top-20 pharmaceutical programs and the growth of its science and engineering team. The company was founded by Rick Schneider, Maxime Allard, and Mathieu Klop, who were school friends and took different paths to address a common issue. Schneider developed technology at Amazon before assisting the German enterprise software firm Celonis in scaling its operations in France and Japan. Allard led data science teams at IBM before pursuing a PhD focusing on reinforcement learning and robotics, while Klop became a cardiologist and genomics researcher.

      As biological foundation models began to emerge, the three recognized a shared gap: the models that could revolutionize drug discovery were progressing faster than the necessary application infrastructure to implement them on a large scale. Helical’s premise is that bio foundation models, which are AI systems trained on extensive genomic, transcriptomic, and proteomic datasets, have already reached a quality level that makes computational hypothesis testing valuable in pharmaceutical research.

      However, the intermediary layer connecting a model’s output to scientific decisions has not advanced accordingly. This results in bench scientists and ML engineers working in isolation, teams recreating individual notebooks for each program, and analyses that are challenging to replicate or transfer across different disease areas. Helical develops the infrastructure to bridge this gap through its platform, which consists of two components: a Virtual Lab for biologists and translational scientists, and a Model Factory for ML engineers and data scientists. Both functions utilize shared data and models to generate consistent, auditable outcomes.

      The company is currently in production with several top-20 global pharmaceutical firms. Its publicly acknowledged collaborations include projects with Pfizer focused on predictive blood-based safety biomarkers and with Tanabe Pharma America on AI-driven target discovery for neurodegenerative diseases like ALS. In these deployments, Helical claims teams have shortened discovery timelines from years to weeks. The broader industry landscape provides significant context for this ambition: global pharmaceutical R&D expenditures exceed $300 billion each year, the average cost to bring a single drug to market exceeds $2 billion, timelines can extend beyond a decade, and over 90% of candidates entering clinical trials fail to gain approval.

      Daniel Graf, General Partner at redalpine, characterized the investment as a bet on the shift “from siloed AI models to integrated virtual AI labs” as biological foundation models and general language reasoning begin to merge. This funding round builds on a previous €2.2 million raised in 2024 from Frst, BoxGroup, and angels including Gomez and Delangue, who are also participating as investors in this latest round.