Although AI is fundamentally dependent on data; Much of the health information remains unused. For understandable reasons — primarily patient privacy; Regulation and IP protection.
“This is the core problem of building AI solutions for related fields like life sciences and medicine,” says German entrepreneur Robin Röhm. Not only that: collaboration is a challenge when it comes to sensitive data. take it awayRöhm's startup aims to solve this through a federated computer, allowing data to be used securely for training AI models without moving it around with a decentralized approach.
It says its clients include Roche and several hospitals.
Federated Computing's core philosophy is to “perform computations locally, where the data resides, and collect the results (eg model parameters) centrally,” says co-founder and managing director Marcin Hejka. OTB activities. Hejka has now co-led an $8.25 million Series A round with deep tech investor Apheris. eCAPITAL.
Hejka believes that Apheris could become an important component in emerging federated data networks. “We're seeing a maturing ecosystem of third-party software tools (open-source federation engines, data quality tools and security products),” he told TechCrunch. “Apheris also enables seamless integration with privacy-enhancing technologies (homomorphic encryption, differential privacy, synthetic data).”
Apheris' new funding comes after a pivot. Originally, Röhm and his co-founder Michael Höh started the company in 2019 with the goal of building a federated learning framework that competes with open source approaches, based on their experiences at their previous startup Janus Genomics. But after raising 2022 is the big seed round.The two made a major breakthrough in 2023 to double down on medicine and life sciences, focusing on the data owner side.
According to Röhm, it paid off. The startup found product-market fit with a new product launched in the last quarter of 2023 and has quadrupled its revenue since then. Backed by existing investors including Octopus Ventures and Heal Capital, its new round brings its total funding to $20.8 million and will also help the company hire senior talent in commercial life sciences.
It uses Apheris Compute Gateway, a software agent that acts as a gateway between local data and AI models. AI Structural Biology (AISB) ConsortiumAbbVie, Boehringer Ingelheim; It's a joint initiative that sees members such as Johnson & Johnson and Sanofi collaborate on AI-driven drug discovery.
Protein complex prediction is a topic that Apheris will further focus on with this new funding. while being use-case agnostic; Although this can add value when very limited public data is available. Life science companies will not unlock much more valuable and diverse data that cannot be unlocked unless they feel safe from doing so.
“Without addressing the concerns of data owners in giving data to AI, I don't think we can really unlock the impact of AI, which is ultimately the core mission of what we're building,” Röhm said.