With artificial intelligence being treated as the next frontier of drug discovery and cell research, efforts to fine-tune the technology are expanding, which is music to the ears of investors that see dollar signs when they hear “machine learning.”
For the Northern California-based Deepcell, that value was reflected in a $73 million series B fundraising round announced Thursday. The company says its AI-powered platform differs from the rest of the field because of its ability to keep whole cells intact through examinations via microfluidics and high-resolution optics. The result is an ever-growing database of whole cells and their phenotype that can better inform biology and cellular mechanisms.
Co-founded by CEO Maddison Masaeli, the company was spun out of Stanford University and launched with a $20 million series A in December 2020. Since then, it’s been working to build out the atlas of cell images that will serve as the foundation of the technology and, according to the company, more than 1 billion images have been captured so far.
