Noetik – an AI-based biotech company leveraging self-supervised machine learning and high-throughput spatial data to develop next-generation cancer therapeutics – announced that it closed an oversubscribed $40 million Series A financing round. This funding was led by Polaris Partners and managing partner Amy Schulman, who will join the board of directors, with participation from new investors Khosla Ventures, Wittington Ventures, and Breakout Ventures.
The round was supported by all existing investors DCVC, Zetta Venture Partners, Catalio Capital Management, 11.2 Capital, Epic Ventures, Intermountain Ventures and North South Ventures. And the funding round also included AI funds ApSTAT Technologies, Linearis Labs and Ventures Fund, supported by leading AI expert Yoshua Bengio and metabolomic expert David Wishart, Element AI co-founder Jean-Francois Gagne, and current and former Recursion executives.
The funding will be used to expand Noetik’s spatial omics-based atlas of human cancer biology (already one of the world’s largest) together with its high throughput in vivo CRISPR Perturb-Map platform. And the funding will enable the company to scale training of its multi-modal cancer foundation models such as OCTO. The company will utilize these platform capabilities to advance an innovative pipeline of cancer therapeutics candidates to the clinic.
Noetik was created to solve critically important challenges in bringing effective new therapeutics to patients: improving target discovery and biomarker development to increase the probability of clinical success. To handle this, the company has built a discovery and development platform that pairs human multimodal spatial omics data purpose-built for machine learning with a massively multiplexed in vivo CRISPR perturbation platform (Perturb-Map). Together these data are used to train self-supervised foundation models of tissue and tumor biology that power the company’s discovery efforts.
The company also aims to establish strategic partnerships and collaborations with leading academic institutions, healthcare providers, and pharmaceutical companies. And the company recently appointed Shafique Virani, M.D. as the company’s Chief Business Officer to spearhead these partnering efforts.
KEY QUOTES:
“We are thrilled to have the support of incredible investors who share our vision of combining deep patient data and artificial intelligence to build the future of cancer therapeutics. This significant financing will enable us to accelerate our progress toward turning biological insights into a portfolio of therapeutic candidates.”
- Ron Alfa, M.D., Ph.D., CEO & Co-Founder, Noetik
“We are excited to partner with Noetik and support their mission to build a pipeline of potentially transformative cancer programs. We have been investing in the most innovative life science technologies for decades and have been excited about the potential of AI. Noetik impressed us both with the sophistication of their platform and the team’s dedication to make an impact for patients.”
- Amy Schulman, Managing Partner, Polaris Partners
“We are thrilled to continue backing Noetik. The team’s speed of execution in building one of the most sophisticated AI-enabled oncology discovery engines in less than two years is unprecedented, and their deep experience and demonstrable progress have only strengthened our conviction.”
- James Hardiman, General Partner, DCVC
