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BenevolentAI
AI-drug discovery
- 201-500 employees
- Healthcare
- B2B
- Artificial Intelligence
- Enterprise
- Biology
- Machine Learning
- Science
- London, GB (HQ), 4-8 Maple St, Bloomsbury
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Company mission
BenevolentAI's mission is to unlock the power of AI to transform drug discovery and bring effective medicines to every patient. Their vision is to drive transformational change through scalable technology solutions that result in a consistent pipeline of successful trials and new medicines for patients.
Few candidates hear
back within 2 weeks
51% female employees
15% employee growth in 12 months
Otta's take
Xav Kearney
CTO of Otta
There is a lot of research being done in the pharmaceutical industry. BenevolentAI say there's a new research paper being published every 30 seconds. They argue this information is not being used in a smart way for the discovery and development of new drugs.
To tackle this problem, BenevolentAI uses artificial intelligence to analyse biomedical information, from clinical trials data to academic papers. They can then identify molecules that have failed in clinical trials and predict how these same compounds can instead be more efficient targeting other diseases.
They argue this approach can dramatically accelerate the discovery of new drugs. They've collaborated with large pharma companies like AstraZeneca and Johnson & Johnson subsidiary Janssen Pharmaceutica. A SPAC merger of 1.5 billion euros included AstraZeneca as an investor and will help BenevolentAI accelerate product development.
It's a big market, with Global Market Insights estimating the global healthcare AI market will exceed $10 billion by 2024. This gives them a big opportunity, but it won't be an easy problem to tackle.
Benefits
- Work from home opportunities
Company values
- Put patients first: Everything we do is geared to getting the right medicine to the right patient, faster
- Break boundaries: We deliberately cross traditional boundaries between technology and science, human and machine, to create unique approaches
- Own the solution: We never hold back from contributing our point of view and taking responsibility
- Drive to delivery: We use data to drive decision-making and deliver with the right level of validation
Funding (last 2 of 3 rounds)
Sep 2019
$90m
LATE VC
Apr 2018
$115m
LATE VC
$305m
Total funding
This company has top investors
Founders
Joanna Shields
(CEO, not founder)Long career in technology, having previously worked at Google, Facebook and Bebo. Appointed to the House of Lords in 2014 and works as a Digital Economy Adviser to the UK Government.
Michael Brennan
(Co-founder & Non-Executive Director)Previously Head of Corporate Development at BenevolentAI. Before cofounding the company, they were Head of Corporate Development at Proximagen Group and Chief Executive of Novum Securities.
Ivan Griffin
(Co-founder & COO)Worked as a Venture Capitalist for over a decade. Also helped launch Genomics England Ltd, a Company created to deliver the 100,000 Genomes Project as launched by the Prime Minister in 2013. Holds a D.Phil. in Cognitive Neuroscience from the University of Oxford where they also completed a year’s post-doctoral research.
People progressing
Joined as a Biomedical Informatics Manager. Promoted to VP after 10 months, then again to SVP of Informatics and Data.
