London-based Helical, a virtual AI lab for pharma R&D, has announced a €8.4 million ($10 million) Seed round to close the gap between computational predictions and biological decision-making, so teams that traditionally worked in silos can collaborate on the same evidence.
The round was led by redalpine with participation from Gradient, BoxGroup, Frst and notable angels including Aidan Gomez (CEO Cohere), Clement Delangue (CEO HuggingFace) and Mario Goetze (pro soccer player).
“The models alone don’t discover drugs. The system does,” says Rick Schneider, co-founder of Helical. “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.”
Helical’s Seed round sits within a broader 2025–2026 funding pattern around AI-enabled drug discovery, computational biology and pharma R&D infrastructure.
Comparable announcements include:
- UK: London-based Kiin Bio with €1.9 million pre-Seed to launch a virtual scientist platform for drug discovery; Oxford-based Scripta Therapeutics with €10.3 million Seed to build a data-rich drug discovery platform; London-based Sable Bio with €3.15 million Seed to scale its AI drug safety platform; OutPost Bio with London and Boston operations raising €2.9 million pre-Seed to advance computable human microbiology; and London-based Ternary Therapeutics with €4.1 million Seed for its AI molecular glue platform.
- Vienna-based Graph Therapeutics with €3 million pre-Seed for an AI-powered inflammation and immunology drug discovery platform
- Geneva-based FluoSphera with €1.23 million to expand AI and automation for preclinical imaging analysis
- Paris-based Generare with €20 million Series A to scale its drug discovery platform and compound library.
Together, those rounds amount to roughly €46.6 million, rising to about €55 million including Helical. That places Helical within an active investment cluster centred on software, modelling and data infrastructure for drug development, with a particularly strong UK presence: Kiin Bio, Scripta Therapeutics, Sable Bio, OutPost Bio and Ternary Therapeutics are all UK-based, and Kiin Bio, Sable Bio and Ternary Therapeutics are, like Helical, London-based.
“We are at a unique point in time where biological foundation models and general language reasoning models are converging,” adds Daniel Graf, General Partner at redalpine. “We backed Helical because we strongly believe they have what it takes to build the pharma AI orchestration platform that will drive this transition from siloed AI models to integrated virtual AI labs.”
Helical was founded in 2024 by three school friends who took different paths into the same problem.
- Rick Schneider built tech at Amazon and later helped the German enterprise Celonis scale in France and Japan.
- Maxime Allard led data science teams at IBM before pursuing a PhD focused on reinforcement learning and robotics.
- Mathieu Klop became a cardiologist and genomics researcher.
When bio foundation models emerged, the trio saw the chance to build the missing application layer that would let pharma teams move from model experimentation to reproducible, production discovery.
According to the company, roughly 50 new drugs are approved each year despite more than 10,000 known diseases, and every promising hypothesis still collides with the same constraint: slow, expensive physical experimentation.
Helical is the virtual AI lab for pharma, designed to turn bio foundation models into reproducible discovery systems so every scientist can test hypotheses in-silico at the speed of inference.
The platform has two product surfaces – the Virtual Lab for biologists and translational scientists, and the Model Factory for ML engineers and data scientists – built on the same data, the same models, and the same results.
By putting both sides in the same system, Helical looks to close the gap between computational predictions and biological decision-making, so teams that traditionally worked in silos can collaborate on the same evidence.
Helical is already in production with multiple top-20 global pharma companies, including a public collaboration with Pfizer on predictive blood-based safety biomarkers.
As per data provided to EU-Startups, R&D spending exceeds €254 billion ($300 billion) annually, timelines stretch beyond a decade, costs to bring a drug to market now exceed €1.6 billion ($2 billion) on average, and more than 90% of candidates entering clinical trials fail.
Looking ahead, Helical plans to deepen deployments across more therapeutic areas and programmes with existing clients, expand to additional top-20 pharma organisations, and continue building the compounding evidence layer that improves performance across diseases.
The company’s mission is to make every scientist able to test hypotheses at the speed of inference and to turn in-silico discovery into a reliable engine for R&D throughput
Read the orginal article: https://www.eu-startups.com/2026/04/with-pharma-rd-teams-under-pressure-to-turn-ai-into-usable-science-helical-lands-e8-4-million/
