Immunai, an AI-driven startup focused on collecting, analysing, and organising immune system data, announced Tuesday it had raised $60 million in Series A funding to create the world’s largest immune system dataset. This capital influx adds to the previous seed round of $4 million, bringing Immunai’s total venture funding up to $64M.
The company intends to use this combined capital to expand its annotation processes and grow its annotated dataset from a currently unknown size. Immunai plans to do this by developing collaborations with clinical sites, universities and hospitals worldwide with the ambitious goal of enabling a full characterization of the shared and unique aspects within human immune systems. With this goal in mind, Immunai believes it can make meaningful contributions across industries such as personalised medicine, biotherapeutics, vaccine development, and diagnostics.
The round was led by GV (formerly Google Ventures) alongside existing investors Aleph VC and OurCrowd QC alongside new investors Eight Roads Ventures (the proprietary venture arm of Fidelity), Grove Ventures, Capnamic Ventures and Triventures who also took part in this latest round.
Better Disease Treatments: Immunai Inks $60M Series A To Fuel Immune System Data Set
Immunai, a startup building a platform to better understand immune systems, has raised $60 million in Series A funding to fuel its immune system data set. This development is significant as this data set could lead to better disease treatments and provide a much clearer understanding of how a person’s immune system works. It could also help scientists to develop immunotherapies to combat major diseases such as cancer.
In this article, we’ll discuss the financial details of the funding and how it will be used to further develop Immunai’s immune system data set.
What is Immunai
Immunai is a biotechnology company that is using big data to gain a better understanding of the immune system. The company uses artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) to analyse millions of cellular datasets from diverse patient populations from their proprietary database. Their platform provides analytical insights into the immune system and uses this knowledge to develop therapeutics for disease prevention, treatment and cures.
Immunai seeks to partner with industry-leading pharmaceutical, immuno-oncology, predictive health, diagnostics and biomedical engineering companies worldwide. Through these partnerships they hope to bring a new level of precision medicine to the market and make it more cost-accessible to benefit patients across many different medical conditions.
Based out of Tel Aviv, Israel, Immunai was founded in 2018 by Uri Canfield PhD; Udi Gil MD; Ori Geva PhD; Elan Ovitsky MD; Erez Peleg MD; Amit Pitaru MBA; Yaron Shaked PhD; Eytan Warehime MD and Sivan Yavichak MD. The company recently raised $60M in Series A funding from Singapore-based edtech fund Maniv Mobility headed by Yossi Vardi with additional investments from Vertex Ventures Israel Fund I LCF managed by Moshe Lichtman PhD; Viola Ventures LLC also managed by Vardi ; Innovation Endeavours LLC funded by Eric Schmidt & Co.; OurCrowd – a leading global venture investment platform led by Jon Medved and Squarepeg Capital – an Australian venture capital firm headquartered in Sydney.
What is Immunai’s mission
Immunai is a leading artificial intelligence (AI) company that has developed a proprietary platform to accelerate life sciences breakthroughs. The platform leverages AI, engineering, and biological sciences advances to understand immune system dynamics and enable low-cost sequencing of large populations. Immunai’s mission is to empower data-driven precision medicine by giving life science organisations unprecedented access to actionable insights from their immune data.
Immunai is partnering with leading biotechnology companies, academic institutions, and clinical research organisations to collect, sequence, analyse and interpret the largest sample sets of assembled single-cell data. Immunai’s approach combines its proprietary AI algorithms with these datasets to generate insights into health and disease states throughout the human life cycle. Not only does this provide a trove of valuable information on the function of disease-relevant pathways and the regulation of immunological responses before clinical interventions occur – it also allows researchers and clinicians to identify novel drug targets, assess potential treatments faster and more accurately, train novel machine learning models, elucidate genetic baselines such as population diversity or ancestry effects – all while accelerating drug development timelines that could result in more efficient treatments for patients on a global scale.
Funding
Immunai, a healthcare startup focused on developing an immune system data set, has recently announced a Series A funding round of $60 million. This is a substantial financial injection for the company that plans to use the funds to grow its immune system dataset which promises to lead to better treatments and diagnosis of diseases.
With the funding, Immunai will also be pushing forward its research into using artificial intelligence and machine learning to further uncover insights into the human immune system and to develop unique digital health solutions.
Let’s take a closer look at this funding round and the potential implications it could have on the healthcare industry.
How much money was raised
Immunai, a New York-based startup building the first immune system data set to further research into diseases, announced it has raised a $60 million Series A in funding from DCVC Bio and other leading venture capital firms. This is the company’s largest single funding round to date, bringing its total funding amount to more than $90 million.
Data Collective (DCVC) Bio led the Series A, with participation from existing investors including TLV Partners — who co-led Immunai’s previous seed round — Third Kind Venture Capital, Charles River Ventures, TLV Partner’s Ohad Finkelstein, Lightspeed Venture Partners, TechAviv and Deep Science Ventures. The funds will be used to continue developing Immunai’s immune system data set and further advance its research partnerships.
This capital injection will enable Immunai to continue building out its platform and accelerate product development efforts to bring meaningful insights derived from the world’s most comprehensive and connected immune system data set to additional stakeholders such as pharma & biotech companies worldwide. It will also be used to expand the company’s business activities and hire across all areas of expertise such as research & development, marketing & sales, product management, etc.
Who are the investors
Immunai has secured $60 million in a Series A round of funding led by GGV Capital and Formation 8 with participation from SoftBank Ventures Asia, Baidu Ventures, TLV Partners, ION Crossover Partners, Commerce Ventures, AIpowered.co and strategic angel investors. This funding round brings Immunai’s total funding to an impressive $74 million.
The immunology and genomics technology company will use these funds primarily for expanding its data set more than ten-fold over the next two years, accelerating the development of its proprietary immune systems graph technology platform. This investment will also advance their machine learning (ML) models and scale their distributed computing infrastructure for processing large datasets in real time. Additionally, it will support expanding Immunai’s current AI-backed services such as inference generation from omics datasets.
The platform provides researchers with access to millions of samples from diverse sources that scientists can easily reference to make faster drug discovery discoveries and provide insights into specific diseases that allow physicians or other healthcare providers to create more effective diagnosis and treatments plans.
CEO Itamar Simon envisions Immunai’s investments making them a leading player in the medical industry: “Our mission is to power the new era of discovery driven healthcare…Data is growing exponentially so integration is essential – we’re providing an integrative analytics platform where discoveries are ready to be made on a large scale”. Investors have demonstrated confidence in Simon’s vision with their recent contributions.
Impact
Immunai Inks $60M Series A To Fuel Immune System Data Set has the potential to greatly impact the way diseases are treated. Through the use of data and advanced analytics, this investment could lead to better disease detection, predictive models, and treatments.
This article will discuss the impact of this funding and how it could lead to improved health outcomes.
How will the funding be used
Immunai, a platform harnessing immunology and advanced machine learning to interpret information within the immune system, announced a $60M Series A funding round led by Emergent Ventures. The company will apply the new funding toward developing its Immunoprofiling Platform which takes a multidimensional approach to understanding immune system data at scale.
They will also use the investments to build and validate drug target hypotheses through trans-omics, support open science and collaborative efforts across pharma, accelerate in silico drug design, interact with experimental biologists on validation and scaling of models, and establish collaboration with leading pharma partners.
Immunai’s platform integrates anonymized multi-omics datasets from patient samples such as single cell RNA sequencing (scRNA-seq), TCR sequencing, proteomics and imaging data for thousands of donors across dozens of diseases. Furthermore, Immunai’s key software components include applications for easily generating high resolution 3D heat maps for exploring immunological relationships related to any gene(s) or cell subsets(s). The computational platform is driven by advanced deep learning algorithms helping Biotech / Pharmaceutical companies discover novel targets and biomarkers faster.
What are the potential benefits
The potential benefits of Immunai’s $60M Series A investment are vast and promise to revolutionise the healthcare sector. The company can leverage its unique patient data set to allow scientists and medical professionals to better understand the immune system, leading to breakthroughs in medical diagnosis, treatment, and ultimately cures.
Immunai uses AI-driven technologies and proprietary immunome data sets to analyse the connections between genes and molecules at a systemic level. This process allows for greater insight into how immune systems behave, helping doctors make informed decisions about therapy plans and more quickly identify useful therapeutic strategies. In addition, by creating comprehensive profiles of individual patients and drawing connections between different pathways, immunologists will be able to exponentially improve their capacity in making decisions that can help prevent or treat autoimmune diseases such as Type 1 diabetes, lupus and Crohn’s disease.
This injection of capital from the Series A financing will fund research efforts that have already begun at Immunai aimed at developing precision medications for chronic diseases and producing a pipeline of therapies for orphan diseases caused by genetic mutations. With speed-to-market capability in this generation’s most advanced areas, innovative biotech companies like Immunai will continue reshaping the healthcare landscape for years ahead.
tags = Immunai, $60M, Fuel Immune System Data Set, Noam Solomon, immunai 60m series foundationwiggersventurebeat, immunai ai 60m series foundationwiggersventurebeat, map the entire immune system, AI
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