Somite AI secures $47.5 million Series A to expand AI platform for cell therapy
The company is developing DeltaStem, an AI-driven platform designed to improve the production of human cells for therapeutic use.
Somite AI, a biotechnology company developing AI tools for human cell therapy, has raised over $47 million in a Series A funding round led by Khosla Ventures. Other participants include Max Levchin’s SciFi Ventures, The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, Fusion Fund, Ajinomoto, Pitango HealthTech, TechAviv, Harpoon Ventures, along with angel investor and former Chairman of Recursion, Dr. R. Martin Chavez.
The company, which once called itself "the OpenAI of stem cell biology", has also welcomed its new CEO of Applications and Board Member Fidji Simo as an investor. Earlier investors included Texas Venture Partners, and this new round brings its total funding to roughly $60 million.
Somite AI is developing DeltaStem, an AI-driven platform designed to improve the production of human cells for therapeutic use. The new funding will advance its capabilities and support programs targeting Type 1 Diabetes, orthopedic injuries, muscular diseases, and blood disorders.
“We’re building the foundation model for the human cell,” said Founder and CEO Dr. Micha Breakstone. “By generating the world’s largest cell signaling dataset at 1000x the efficiency of current methods, we’re training DeltaStem to deliver protocols with unmatched purity, scalability, and reliability. We are rapidly driving towards an AlphaFold moment for developmental biology, enabling the scalable production of any cell, for anyone.”
Somite AI’s capsule technology generates large-scale cell state transition data that feeds into the DeltaStem model. According to the company, this allows faster development of cell differentiation protocols compared to traditional approaches.
"I think we're really at a dawn of a new age where we're really using or leveraging AI to usher in this new age or era of human regeneration and repair," Breakstone added, in an interview with CTech. "I think if you believe in AI and the exciting opportunities that it yields and the ability to make us more creative, smarter, more intelligent, more prosperous, I think the next frontier is actually not resigning ourselves to letting our own body deteriorate. I think that is what Somite is about: to come in and replenish the body with our own types of cells, but any type of cell to cure diseases. That's the next level of prosperity and abundance that we want to be ushering in."
Somite AI was co-founded by Breakstone, a serial AI entrepreneur, and Dr. Jonathan Rosenfeld, Head of the Fundamental AI Group at MIT. Other co-founders include Harvard and University of Washington researchers Prof. Olivier Pourquié, Prof. Allon Klein, Prof. Jay Shendure, and Prof. Cliff Tabin.
"Traditional cell therapies are expensive, slow to develop, and unpredictable. AI can systematically solve these challenges,” added Vinod Khosla, founder of Khosla Ventures. “Somite AI’s foundation models, once fully developed and validated, will not only create value for their own pipeline, but have the potential to reshape the entire field of human cell therapy.”
