Valinor, a San Francisco-based artificial intelligence company focused on improving clinical trial outcomes, has raised $13 million in seed funding to expand its proprietary machine learning platform for patient selection. The financing was led by CRV, with participation from Harpoon Ventures, Amino Collective, and Pelion Venture Partners, alongside a group of angel investors and technology operators.
The funding will be used to scale Valinor’s multimodal machine learning platform, which is designed to predict patient response to therapies by analyzing matched multi-omic data and real-world clinical outcomes. By improving the ability to distinguish likely responders from non-responders earlier in the drug development process, the company aims to reduce trial failure rates, lower research and development costs, and accelerate the delivery of new treatments to patients.
Valinor’s platform is built on proprietary datasets that combine patient-derived biological samples with treatment response data across disease indications. These datasets are used to train predictive models that can surface underlying biological features associated with therapeutic response. In addition to improving patient selection, the models are intended to uncover novel biology that can help redefine target patient populations and identify potential new indications for existing drug candidates.
With the new capital, Valinor plans to expand its matched omics and clinical outcome datasets and continue advancing its AI models to support more data-driven decision-making in drug development. The company will also grow its San Francisco-based team, with a focus on recruiting additional machine learning talent.
Valinor operates at the intersection of artificial intelligence and therapeutic research, positioning itself among a growing group of technology-driven biotech companies using advanced analytics to de-risk drug development. Investors backing the round cited the company’s disease-focused, AI-first approach and access to high-quality clinical data as key differentiators in an increasingly competitive field.
Founded to address inefficiencies in traditional clinical trial design, Valinor is developing a suite of patient-derived datasets and predictive models intended to support pharmaceutical companies across therapeutic areas and drug modalities. By reducing trial-and-error in clinical development, the company seeks to improve the probability of success for experimental therapies and accelerate progress in therapeutic research.
KEY QUOTES:
“Our models are built to surface meaningful features that underlie patient response. We believe this approach will empower our pharmaceutical partners to improve clinical trial success rates, cut R&D costs and, most importantly, speed the delivery of life-saving medicines to patients. With this funding, we are accelerating the expansion of our proprietary matched omics and clinical outcome datasets and advancing our AI models that allow our pharma partners to make smarter, data-driven decisions in drug development.”
Joshua Pacini, Founder and Chief Executive Officer of Valinor
“As early backers of tech bio pioneers like Recursion, we’ve seen AI become the driving force accelerating the next generation of drug development. Valinor pushes the frontier further with an AI-first, disease-focused platform training on exceptional clinical data. We believe this approach can meaningfully improve clinical trial success.”
Brittany Walker, General Partner, CRV
