Helical, a pharma‑focused artificial‑intelligence startup founded by three Luxembourgish childhood friends, closed a $10 million seed round on Tuesday. The round was led by redalpine and featured existing investors Gradient, BoxGroup and Frst, while high‑profile angels such as Cohere CEO Aidan Gomez, HuggingFace CEO Clément Delangue and professional footballer Mario Goetze also participated.

The capital will support Helical’s push into additional top‑20 pharmaceutical programmes and the growth of its science‑engineering team. The company’s platform consists of two complementary surfaces: a Virtual Lab that lets biologists and translational scientists interact with AI models, and a Model Factory that provides ML engineers and data scientists a shared environment for model development. Both layers operate on the same data and foundation models, delivering reproducible, auditable results.

Helical’s founders—Rick Schneider, Maxime Allard and Mathieu Klop—bring a blend of industry and academic experience. Schneider previously built technology at Amazon and helped scale enterprise software firm Celonis in Europe and Japan. Allard led data‑science teams at IBM before earning a PhD in reinforcement learning and robotics. Klop practiced as a cardiologist and conducted genomics research. Their combined expertise led them to notice a market gap: while bio foundation models trained on massive genomic, transcriptomic and proteomic datasets have reached a quality threshold that makes hypothesis testing viable, the infrastructure needed to turn model outputs into actionable scientific decisions has lagged behind.

According to Helical, the platform already runs in production with multiple top‑20 global pharma companies. Publicly disclosed collaborations include work with Pfizer on predictive blood‑based safety biomarkers and a partnership with Tanabe Pharma America to accelerate target discovery for neurodegenerative diseases such as ALS. In those deployments, Helical claims discovery timelines have shrunk from years to weeks, a compression that could have major cost implications given that global pharma R&D spending exceeds $300 billion annually and a single drug can cost more than $2 billion to bring to market.

Redalpine’s Daniel Graf described the investment as a bet on the transition “from siloed AI models to integrated virtual AI labs,” noting that the convergence of biological foundation models and advanced language reasoning opens new opportunities for drug discovery. The seed round builds on a prior €2.2 million raise earlier this year, which also saw participation from Frst, BoxGroup and the same angel investors.

Helical’s next steps involve scaling its deployed science and engineering teams, extending the platform’s reach across more disease areas, and deepening collaborations with leading pharmaceutical firms. If the company can deliver on its promise to make AI‑driven hypothesis testing routine, it could help shorten development cycles and improve the odds of success for new therapeutics.

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