Google, Meta and Isomorphic Labs Put $300M Into Biohub’s Virtual Cell as Healthleap and Rivercell Raise AI-Biology Funding

The funding supports Biohub’s effort to create a “virtual cell” that researchers can use to carry out simulations. Founded in 2016, Biohub aims to combat diseases through this approach. The US Department of Energy will invest more than $500 million over the next five years, while the National Institutes of Health will contribute datasets, repositories and knowledge bases stemming from previous federal investment totaling more than $500 million. Alex Rives, Biohub’s head of science, said in a press release: “An accurate predictive model of biology could dramatically accelerate scientific discovery by enabling scientists to perform experiments digitally. The creation of a virtual cell is one of the most important challenges for the next era of science. It will require coordinated data generation efforts at a national and international scale, which is why these partners are coming together.”

Healthleap, a startup building an AI platform that reads patient records to identify patients at risk of undiagnosed illnesses, has raised $38 million in seed and Series A funding, TechCrunch reported exclusively. The financing includes an $8 million seed round co-led by Sequoia Capital and First Round Capital, and a $30 million Series A led by Hummingbird Ventures. The company is not disclosing its valuation.

Founded in South Africa in 2022 by siblings Jemima and Josiah Meyer, Healthleap initially offered a clinical nutrition tool Jemima had built for dietitians. It later pivoted to a more general-purpose platform that aims to identify patients admitted to hospitals who may be suffering from conditions such as malnutrition or delirium that are not often identified early enough, CEO and co-founder Josiah Meyer told TechCrunch.

Healthleap’s platform is deployed in more than 50 hospitals, up from three hospital partners a year earlier, and its customers include Penn Medicine, Cedars-Sinai, Intermountain, Houston Methodist and Emory Healthcare, Josiah said. The platform plugs into a hospital’s electronic health record system and uses language models to pull information from written notes, such as references to recent weight loss or difficulty swallowing. That analysis is fed into risk models alongside structured information such as lab reports and vitals to surface patients who may need a closer look. The company says its software does not diagnose patients, only highlights items for additional review.

“Each night, we analyze every adult inpatient’s record: lab results, vital signs, weights, medications, diet orders, diagnoses, clinicians’ notes, and more,” Josiah explained. “Each morning, we write a risk score into the care team’s existing workflow with a dashboard accessible that holds additional information about the patients’ trends.”

Research suggests 20% to 50% of hospital inpatients are malnourished, and some studies have linked malnutrition with longer stays, impaired wound healing, infections and other complications, as well as higher morbidity and mortality. Healthleap says its malnutrition program at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania resulted in $23.8 million in annualized financial impact, of which $6.3 million came from additional reimbursement and $17.5 million from shorter hospital stays. The startup sells three-year contracts priced according to a hospital’s licensed bed count and also uses an outcome-based pricing model. Revenue has grown more than 10x over the past year, Josiah said. Healthleap plans to spend the fresh cash on engineering, product, sales and customer success as it adds support for identifying more conditions. Meyer said the company ultimately wants to cover more than 40 major health conditions and expand into outpatient and home care.

Also on Oct. 7, Sifted reported that Paris-based biotech Rivercell has raised a $25 million seed round to build an AI model that understands and predicts the behavior of human cells, which it says could significantly boost drug discovery efforts. The startup is building an automated wet lab to generate high-quality data at scale about human cell behavior, according to Sifted. Sifted described the company as founded by an Owkin alumnus and said the model is intended as a “world model” for human cells.