Former Google AI leader lands $100M Series A raise for ‘biological software’ startup

Jakob Uszkoreit, one of the people who laid the groundwork for generative platforms such as ChatGPT, has secured $100 million in a Series A raise for an AI biotech startup that aims to discover new therapies and vaccines.

Kevin Heyries

Palo Alto-based Inceptive was established in 2021 by CEO Uszkoreit and CBO Kevin Heyries, former co-founder of antibody company AbCellera. The fund will support Inceptive’s AI platform that designs mRNA molecules to be licensed to pharma companies for clinical trial investigation.

The fund includes Silicon Valley investors Nvidia and Andreessen Horowitz and San Francisco’s Obvious Ventures. The new raise triples Inceptive’s valuation to over $300 million since its launch, building from its initial seed funding of $20 million.

Inceptive will use the generative AI tech developed by Uszkoreit, who co-authored the “Attention Is All You Need” publication that laid the foundation for platforms such as ChatGPT. He previously worked on Google Translate and built the language understanding team of Google Assistant.

Inceptive’s ambition aligns with the current trend of using AI in the pharma industry, with Precedence Research predicting the market to reach over $9.2 billion by 2030.

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