French biotech unicorn Owkin is planning to cut dozens of staff, Sifted has learned, as the company shifts to a business model focused on AI agents.
Founded in 2016, biotech Owkin has raised more than $300m from investors such as Sanofi and Cathay Innovation, aiming to improve clinical trials, identify new treatments and solve other longstanding healthcare challenges using AI.
Three months ago, the company unveiled “Owkin K”, an agentic AI platform that acts as a copilot for medical researchers. The tool marked a change in Owkin’s business model, which until now relied on multi-year contracts providing AI services to pharmaceutical companies.
Since then, the Paris-based scaleup has filed a “rupture conventionnelle collective” (RCC), a process by which a company can cut jobs by asking a number of employees to voluntarily quit their role, according to four sources familiar with the matter. One source with direct knowledge says the RCC aims to cut 40-50 roles, out of a workforce of 325 people.
Owkin confirmed to Sifted the company has “reached out to the CSE (the French employee counsel) to discuss a potential project of voluntary departure via a RCC.”
A RCC is more flexible than layoffs and typically occurs for strategic or organisational reasons.
Three sources with direct knowledge tell Sifted the company is also discussing spinning out its diagnostics department, which develops AI-powered tools for pathology diagnosis.
Insiders say this is the latest of several internal team reorganisations in recent years as the company races to keep up with a fast-moving industry. “The only certainty is that after a reorganisation, there will be another,” one former employee said.
Current and former employees described several disorderly shifts, in which changes occurred “with great violence” and poor communication from leadership.
Some employees disagreed with this characterisation of Owkin’s working culture. One current employee says: “It’s always been very dynamic, […] but the culture is positive.”
“For me these are normal developments and what can be expected from a startup evolving in an ultra-competitive environment.”
An Owkin spokesperson said: “We have always taken a structured and transparent approach to reorganisations. We consult with the CSE, communicate through management layers, and share the rationale openly with the entire company.”
Towards Owkin K
Owkin launched almost a decade ago with the ambitious goal of changing the way researchers engage with the complexity of biology. It has secured research partnerships with academic institutions and hospitals across Europe and the US, granting it access to high-quality data and the ability to build a pipeline of clinically-validated machine learning models.
Owkin monetises these tools through commercial partnerships with pharmaceutical companies. In 2021, the startup reached a billion-dollar valuation when it secured a $180m Series B from Sanofi, as part of a deal to leverage the company’s technologies to improve target identification and immunology treatments.
A year later, it closed another $80m in equity from Bristol Myers Squibb, as part of a collaboration to design more precise and efficient clinical trials.
Since then, Owkin has launched a number of complementary strategies such as building AI-powered diagnostics tools and creating data networks. In 2023 it launched the Mosaic initiative, a €50m project (half of which is funded by the scaleup) to create a collaborative oncology dataset.
For the past two years Owkin has also been developing an internal drug discovery pipeline; in January the company said it is running a human clinical trial for its own drug candidate.
In early 2025 Owkin announced Owkin K, promising to unlock AGI (or superintelligence) for biology. This will become the company’s core product (although efforts to develop drug candidates in the long-term will also continue), says Owkin CEO and cofounder Thomas Clozel, as part of an attempt to simplify the company’s offering — but also to catch the opportunity to ride the AGI wave.
While tech giants like OpenAI seem to be winning for generalist use cases of AGI, says Clozel, no clear winner has emerged in biology yet. “But for the past nine years, we’ve been accumulating data. We thought this was something we could win on,” he says.
Clozel says these developments have always aligned with Owkin’s vision from the start. “We haven’t changed the mission,” says Clozel. “From our first deck, the vision was to change how we think about biology.”
“The evolution — not the pivot — towards Owkin K was quite natural with the explosion of AGI. We woke up to the fact we could make [the technology] much more accessible.”
A spinout strategy
In 2024, Owkin’s revenues hit nearly $86m — an 83% increase from 2023. This was largely driven by partnerships with pharmaceutical companies, says Clozel, because these collaborations are “milestone-based”, meaning Owkin makes revenue when it hits specific targets, typically every three to four years.
Owkin K, which can be sold directly to customers, will enable the company to “take back control” and be less reliant on pharmaceutical companies’ development cycles. In the next 5-6 years, Clozel says he hopes to hit up to $400m in revenues and reach profitability.
Alongside launching Owkin K, the scaleup is also keen to spin out certain parts of the business to continue simplifying the company’s offer while also reducing costs. This started with Bioptimus, which in 2024 raised a $35m seed in 2024 to build a large-language model (LLM) for biology. Sources also tell Sifted Owkin is currently spinning out its diagnostics unit.
The strategy is paying off: in 2024 Owkin significantly reduced net losses from $31.3m to $5.6m. With $200m still in the bank, the company still has about two and a half years of runway, but Clozel says he will soon start fundraising again to “accelerate on AGI”, with a target of $200m-300m.
Reorganising teams
A number of sources tell Sifted Owkin’s roadmap over the past few years shows a lack of direction. “Owkin doesn’t know what it wants to do and keeps changing,” says one employee.
“There is clearly a lack of visibility when it comes to the strategy,” says one former employee.
This has caused several internal team ‘reorganisations’ in which employees were moved to other parts of the company or asked to take up alternative positions. In some cases, reorganisations saw employees pushed to leave the company or to switch roles, according to one current employee and two former employees.
An Owkin spokesperson said this is not accurate. “A cornerstone of our process is supporting our people: we open roles internally first, encourage career mobility, and focus on development,” they said.
Some say communication about team reorganisations throughout these changes has been poor. One former employee described a “huge lack of transparency”; an employee says announcements were often brutal, reflecting “huge managerial issues”.
“They have a right to change their strategy […] but they could have done a better job of communicating the plan and doing some change management,” says another former employee.
As the company moves to focus on its AI agent offering, however, some employees tell Sifted such changes are standard for a company like Owkin. “All the evolutions over the past three years are changes that are specific to a startup evolving in a dynamic environment where you have to constantly reinvent yourself to have an edge,” one employee says.
Clozel says there have been no mass layoffs but confirmed the company has been planning to cut some roles.
“Have we been perfect from an HR perspective? No — sometimes we recruited some people a bit too fast, especially after we raised funds,” he says.
“When you have a new product, you have to adapt. […] We’re trying to do this intelligently, and to be more alert to people who may wish to leave.”
Owkin introduced graded performance reviews in 2021, says Clozel, which didn’t exist before. “We’re trying to find an evaluation system to separate ourselves from low performers,” he says.
Some however say performance has been used unfairly to initiate departures and layoffs. One former employee says they received a performance improvement plan (PIP) even after they scored highly in their review.
The past few years have seen some turnover, therefore, but Owkin’s workforce has remained stable. According to the business’s figures, 51 permanent employees left in 2024, but another 51 joined that year making for a total of 325 employees.
Several employees and former employees say departures were also due to staff naturally moving on after many years at the company, particularly as the market for AI talent heats up. “Some people were made offers elsewhere that they simply couldn’t refuse,” says one current employee.
One former employee says they left “with no bad blood” and they experienced overall a positive work environment at Owkin.
Read the orginal article: https://sifted.eu/articles/owkin-job-cuts-ai-agents-pivot/
