AI fundamentally relies on data, but the vast majority of medical data is not used for understandable reasons, primarily patient privacy, regulation, and intellectual property protection.
“This is the fundamental problem” in building AI solutions for life sciences, pharmaceuticals and related fields, said German entrepreneur Robin Rehm. That's not all. Collaboration can be difficult when it comes to sensitive data. ROHM startup Apheris aims to address this problem through federated computing. This means taking a decentralized approach so that data can be accessed securely without moving it to train AI models.
The company says its customers include Roche and several hospitals.
The core philosophy of federated computing is that computations are performed locally where the data resides, and only the outputs (such as model parameters) are aggregated centrally. said Marcin Hejka, co-founder and managing partner of OTB Ventures. Heika is currently co-leading an $8.25 million Series A into Apheris with fellow deep tech investor eCAPITAL.
Hejka believes Apheris has the potential to become a key component in the emerging federated data networks. “We're seeing a maturing ecosystem of third-party software tools (open source federation engines, data quality tools, security products),” he told TechCrunch. “Apheris also enables seamless integration with complementary privacy-enhancing technologies: homomorphic encryption, differential privacy, and synthetic data.”
Afelis' new funding comes in the wake of the transformation. Originally, Rehm and his co-founder Michael Ho wanted to build a federated learning framework to compete with open source approaches, building on their experience at their previous startup Janus Genomics. The company was established in 2019 with the goal of However, after raising a large seed round in 2022, the two companies made a major pivot in 2023 to focus on the data owner side and focus on the pharmaceutical and life sciences space.
According to Rehm, this has worked. The startup saw a product-market fit with a new product it launched in the last quarter of 2023 and has quadrupled its revenue since then. Backed by existing investors including Octopus Ventures and Heal Capital, the latest funding brings total funding to $20.8 million and will help the company hire senior talent with commercial and life science backgrounds. It will be useful.
Apheris Compute Gateway, a software agent that acts as a gateway between local data and AI models, is already being used by the AI Structural Biology (AISB) Consortium, a collaborative initiative involving members such as AbbVie, Boehringer Ingelheim, and Johnson. I am. & Johnson and Sanofi are collaborating on AI-powered drug discovery.
Protein complex prediction will be one of the topics Apheris will focus more on with this new funding. While being use case agnostic, we understand that while the public data available is very limited, far more valuable and diverse data can add value if it is not made public unless life sciences companies feel it is safe to do so. I understand.
“We don’t think we can really unlock the impact of AI unless we address the concerns of data owners when providing data to AI. Ultimately, that’s at the heart of what we’re building. “This is our mission,” Rehm said.