Helical Closes $10M Seed Round to Turn Bio Foundation Models into Systems April 14, 2026 - 12:00 pm London-based pharma AI startup Helical , founded by three Luxembourgish childhood friends, has raised $10 million in a seed round led by redalpine , with participation from Gradient, BoxGroup , and Frst . Notable angel investors include Aidan Gomez, CEO of Cohere; Clément Delangue, CEO of HuggingFace; and Mario Goetze, a professional footballer . The funding will support expansion across more top-20 pharma programmes and growth of Helical's deployed science and engineering team.
The Startup's Origin Story Helical was founded by Rick Schneider, Maxime Allard, and Mathieu Klop , who identified a gap in the market when biological foundation models started emerging: a lack of usable application infrastructure to make them meaningful at scale in pharma research. Previously, each of these individuals had pursued different paths: Schneider built technology at Amazon and helped Celonis scale operations in France and Japan. Allard led data science teams at IBM before pursuing a PhD focused on reinforcement learning and robotics.
Klop became a cardiologist and genomics researcher. Addressing the Gap Helical's platform bridges the gap between a model's output and a scientific decision by providing: A Virtual Lab for biologists and translational scientists. A Model Factory for ML engineers and data scientists, both utilizing shared data and models for consistent, auditable results.
The company is already collaborating with multiple top-20 global pharma companies, including Pfizer on predictive blood-based safety biomarkers, and Tanabe Pharma America on AI-driven target discovery for neurodegenerative diseases. These collaborations have led to significant time compression in drug discovery: from years to weeks. The Bigger Picture Global pharma R&D spending exceeds $300 billion annually, with an average cost of more than $2 billion to bring a single drug to market and a failure rate of 90% for candidates entering clinical trials.
Helical aims to revolutionize this landscape by making bio foundation models truly usable at scale.