GenAI drug discovery startup DeepLife has raised a $10m Series A as it prepares to expand to the US. It could relocate fully to the country further down the line as it looks to tap growth capital and a wider pool of technical talent, founder and CEO Jonathan Baptista tells Sifted.
The round was led by YZR Capital and the VC arm of French insurer Relyens. Beiersdorf Venture Capital and Prunay Group also participated.
France-based DeepLife is developing technology to help pharma companies repurpose existing drugs for new conditions by simulating their effects on an AI platform that creates “digital twins” of cells.
It’s part of a growing wave of startups selling AI-powered SaaS products to industry for drug discovery, rather than trying to shoulder the hugely costly sums involved in developing the drugs themselves.
Google Maps of cells
While many of those startups are deploying their technology to help pharma companies develop new drugs and molecules, there’s also a big opportunity to find new uses for drugs already on the market, says founder and CEO Jonathan Baptista.
“There’s more than 8k drugs on the market, and we don’t know how all of them work,” he tells Sifted. Instead of spending many years on drug discovery (the average drug takes 10-15 years to hit the shelves) pharma can find new treatment options much faster by repurposing old drugs, he adds.
Founded in 2019, DeepLife is building what Baptista calls a “Google Maps of cells”, using genAI models that the company has trained on publicly available data, alongside data collected from hospitals and genomic research centres.
While the company has previously brought in revenue selling cell data to pharma companies — it’s now focusing on deploying its genAI platform, says Baptista. The startup will initially target treatments for autoimmune and neurodegenerative disease areas.
DeepLife has recently signed a two-year licensing agreement with a molecule manufacturing company — which it can’t name — to use its platform to identify how to improve particular compounds. It was the first commercial deal for the platform (DeepLife has since signed another, smaller deal).
“Five years ago, people were telling us we were crazy and it would never work,” he tells Sifted. But in 2024, the startup ran a proof of concept project with French state-backed medical research institute Inserm to identify drugs that could change behaviour of cancer cells in children.
DeepLife’s platform produced better results in three months than Inserm had managed to achieve in four years, Baptista says. “This year was the first time we assessed that our data was good enough to get interesting results to do [the digital twinning of cells properly].”
Pharma shift
The success of that project was one of the key reasons DeepLife went out to fundraise, but the mentality of pharma and biotech companies — its target customers — has also shifted, says Baptista.
“There’s a willingness to move past the status quo on generating a drug using empirical methods,” he tells Sifted. “Pharma companies understand how with [AI] we can solve drug discovery issues [now].” It’s easier to “make them understand” why they should invest in a platform like DeepLife, he adds.
That shift has shortened the time it takes for companies selling tech solutions to pharma — meaning startups can become revenue generating quicker, William McQuillan, partner at Frontline Ventures, told Sifted in February. “[Lead time to sell into pharma] has dropped to at least half if not a third [of what it was five years ago].”
Moving to the US
The big focus for this round is expanding in the US — where almost 50% of the global drug discovery market is based, says Baptista. DeepLife will build out its technical and sales team on that side of the Atlantic.
A company-wide relocation could also be on the cards after it raises a Series B — which Baptista tells Sifted could happen early 2026. It will look to raise $20-40m.
“There’s a lot of technical talent in the US that wants to stay in the US,” he says. Being close to the Boston ecosystem, “where everything is in techbio” is also a draw, as is the wider availability of funding.
Read the orginal article: https://sifted.eu/articles/deeplife-10m-series-a-news/
