Maven Capital Partners and YFM Equity Partners have announced the completion of a £6.5m Series A investment for Biorelate.
Biorelate, founded in 2014 and led by Daniel Jamieson, curates dark biomedical knowledge to empower drug discovery with its proprietary AI platform, Galactic AI. Galactic AI’s technology combines natural language processing (NLP) and machine learning (ML) to capture valuable biomedical data that pharmaceutical and life sciences organisations can utilise to improve decision making in their drug discovery programs.
As drug discovery becomes increasingly more difficult to turn into profit, biopharmaceutical companies are investing more into AI and data-driven solutions that improve the chances of success. These same approaches can also be instrumental in finding entirely new hypotheses unforeseen by human experts.
Biorelate are helping on both fronts by capturing billions of biomedical datapoints not found in existing databases, that they use to form a more complete map of scientific research. They then use this to support biopharma companies with target, biomarker and other related drug discovery challenges.
Since launching Galactic AI in 2020, Biorelate has experienced significant growth and has brought on board leading global companies such as AstraZeneca and Idorsia.
The funding was raised through YFM’s VCTs, the Maven VCTs and Triple Point Ventures, with continued investment from NPIF – Maven Equity Finance, which is managed by Maven and part of the Northern Powerhouse Investment Fund, as well as a group of angel investors from the Manchester Tech Trust. Biorelate will use the investment to increase its commercial and technical capacity, as well as wider expansion into the US to tap into the industry’s largest market.
Gavin Bell, investment director led the deal for Maven. The YFM team included Andy Thomas, Aaron Lowery and Ian Waterfield.
Biorelate CEO Jamieson said: “We are at a time where there is a stupendous amount of untapped evidence, like cause-and-effect, sat dark and subsequently unused. Our mission at Biorelate is to capture this untapped data and help make sense of it. With this improved understanding we are empowering companies to make better decisions and speed up the drug discovery process.”
Maven’s Bell added: “Biorelate has grown significantly since we first backed the business at an early stage through NPIF Maven Equity Finance. It’s exciting to see an innovative deep tech business born in Manchester now develop globally. We’re absolutely delighted to continue to support the vision and ambition of Dan and the Biorelate team, to scale and capitalise on the attractive global growth opportunities.”
