Helical Raises $10M Funding In Seed round Led By Redalpine

The round was led by redalpine, with participation from Gradient, BoxGroup, and Frst, alongside angel investors including Aidan Gomez (Cohere), Clement Delangue (Hugging Face), and footballer Mario Götze.

Founded in early 2024 by Rick Schneider, Maxime Allard and Mathieu Klop, Helical aims to solve a major bottleneck in drug discovery the limited capacity of physical experimentation.

While biological foundation models allow researchers to test ideas computationally, translating these insights into reliable, real-world outcomes remains a challenge.

Helical addresses this by building an application layer that connects computational predictions with biological validation, enabling more efficient and collaborative research workflows.

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Its platform operates as a virtual AI lab with two core components: the Virtual Lab, designed for biologists and translational scientists, and the Model Factory, built for machine learning engineers and data scientists. By working on shared datasets, models, and results, the platform helps break down silos and supports evidence-based decision-making throughout the drug discovery process.

Helical is already collaborating with several top 20 global pharmaceutical companies. Its platform has been applied to areas such as target identification, biomarker discovery, and therapeutic design, helping reduce discovery timelines and enabling expansion into new therapeutic areas.

In an industry marked by rising R&D costs and long development cycles, Helical aims to improve both the efficiency and reliability of drug discovery processes.

The newly raised funding will be used to deepen deployments with existing clients across multiple therapeutic areas, expand partnerships with additional pharmaceutical companies, and further enhance the platform’s evidence layer to improve performance across a range of diseases.

According to co-founder Rick Schneider, impactful drug discovery depends not just on models, but on systems that can effectively combine and operationalise their insights.

Pharma teams need a system that turns foundation models into workflows scientists can run, validate, and defend. We built Helical to make in-silico science reproducible at pharma scale, so teams can go from hypothesis to decision in days instead of months.

About Helical

Helical is a virtual AI lab for pharmaceutical research providing an application layer that turns biological foundation models into reproducible discovery systems. Its platform enables scientists to test hypotheses in silico accelerating drug discovery and improving collaboration between biology and machine learning teams across the research process.