Ingenix, an artificial intelligence and biology company, has announced a €13 million seed-extension funding round led by Sofinnova Partners, with participation from Inovo VC and OTB VC. The investment will accelerate the development of Ingenix's Biological Reasoning Engine and expand its partnerships with pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies through the newly launched Qualified Access Program.
Modality Fusion: A Novel Architecture
Ingenix's Biological Reasoning Engine leverages a unique architecture called Modality Fusion, which integrates best-in-class models across different biological modalities and scales. Unlike traditional AI approaches that rely on training larger models on larger datasets, Modality Fusion allows the system to reason across representations directly, addressing the complexity of biology that is non-linguistic and spans multiple modalities.
In a recent oncology engagement, the Biological Reasoning Engine achieved in minutes what had taken a partner biotech several years and millions of euros of research. The engine successfully prioritized dual-payload antibody-drug conjugates (ADCs) from thousands of possible configurations, demonstrating its potential to revolutionize drug development.
Expert Team and Vision
The team behind Ingenix combines frontier AI researchers with senior pharmaceutical scientists, including the founders of Applica, an AI company acquired by Snowflake in 2022. Their TILT model contributed to the GPT-4 benchmark. Piotr Surma, CEO and co-founder of Ingenix, stated: “This funding lets us extend the Biological Reasoning Engine to the partners and questions where it can do the most useful work. We built Ingenix on the conviction that biology needs an AI architecture designed for biology, not a general-purpose model retrofitted to it.”
Investor Confidence
Simon Turner, Partner at Sofinnova Partners, commented: “It is no longer enough to just build models. Ingenix is building the reasoning layer that connects biology, chemistry, and clinical data into something a scientist can interrogate and act on. That is the hard bit, and that is where the value compounds.”
The funding will support further development of the Biological Reasoning Engine and broaden its application across various therapeutic areas, positioning Ingenix as a key player in AI-driven drug discovery.
