Somite AI, a tech-bio company utilizing foundation models and proprietary AI to advance human cell therapy development, announced it closed a Series A funding round raising more than $47 million. The funding round was led by Khosla Ventures, with participation from SciFi VC, the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, Fusion Fund, Ajinomoto Group Ventures, Pitango HealthTech, TechAviv, Harpoon Ventures, along with angel investors such as Dr. R. Martin Chavez (former Chairman of Recursion), and Fidji Simo (outgoing CEO of Instacart and incoming CEO of Applications at OpenAI).
What Somite AI does: Somite AI is building DeltaStem, a platform and foundation model designed to revolutionize the production of human cells. And this funding positions Somite AI to accelerate key therapeutic programs, including beta cells for type 1 diabetes, articular cartilage for orthopedic applications, satellite cells for muscular diseases, and hematopoietic cells for blood disorders, and further develop the capabilities of its DeltaStem platform.
Somite AI’s proprietary capsule technology generates cell state transition data at a major scale, achieving efficiency 1000x greater than existing methodologies. And this data feeds into the DeltaStem foundation model, significantly accelerating and optimizing the development of novel cell differentiation protocols.
Company founders: Somite AI was co-founded by Dr. Micha Breakstone, a seasoned AI entrepreneur (Chorus.ai, acquired for $575 million), and Dr. Jonathan Rosenfeld, Head of the Fundamental AI Group at MIT, alongside prominent scientific co-founders:
— Prof. Olivier Pourquié, member of the National Academies of Science and Medicine, Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School
— Prof. Allon Klein, James Prize recipient, Harvard Medical School
— Prof. Jay Shendure, member of the National Academy of Sciences, University of Washington
— Prof. Cliff Tabin, Chair of Genetics at Harvard Medical School, member of the National Academy of Sciences
KEY QUOTES:
“We’re building the foundation model for the human cell. By generating the world’s largest cell signaling dataset at 1000x the efficiency of current methods, we’re training DeltaStem to deliver protocols with unmatched purity, scalability, and reliability. We are rapidly driving towards an AlphaFold moment for developmental biology, enabling the scalable production of any cell, for anyone.”
Dr. Micha Breakstone, Founder and CEO of Somite AI
“Traditional cell therapies are expensive, slow to develop, and unpredictable. AI can systematically solve these challenges. Somite AI’s foundation models, once fully developed and validated, will not only create value for their own pipeline, but have the potential to reshape the entire field of human cell therapy.”
Vinod Khosla, founder of Khosla Ventures
