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.