Startup targets developmental biology’s ‘AlphaFold moment’ with foundation model that improves how cells are produced for cell therapies.
Boston-based startup Somite AI emerged this week, securing over $47 million in a Series A funding round led by Khosla Ventures for its mission to accelerate the development of human cell therapies using AI. The company is building a proprietary AI platform and foundation model called “DeltaStem”, which is designed to change the way cell therapies are discovered, developed and deployed.
Somite claims that the cell therapy sector has long been constrained by time-consuming and costly development processes, often relying on trial-and-error methodologies that can span a decade or more. In its introductory blog post, the company states that it is “leveraging AI for a new age in human regeneration and repair,” and aims to tackle this bottleneck by applying AI foundation models to human stem cells. The ultimate goal is to make cell differentiation an engineering problem governed by computation rather than experimentation.
At the core of Somite’s innovation is its capsule technology, which enables the company to generate cell state transition data at a scale and efficiency that it claims surpasses current methods by a factor of 1,000. This feeds into the company’s foundation model, which is trained to discover and optimize cell differentiation protocols. According to Somite, the result is a system capable of producing pure, functional and scalable cell types with far greater speed and reliability than previous approaches.
Somite’s founding team includes Dr Micha Breakstone, a serial AI entrepreneur, Dr Jonathan Rosenfeld, head of the Fundamental AI Group at MIT, and several leading scientists in developmental biology and genetics.
“We’re building the foundation model for the human cell,” said Breakstone. “By generating the world’s largest cell signaling dataset at 1000x the efficiency of current methods, we’re training DeltaStem to deliver protocols with unmatched purity, scalability, and reliability. We are rapidly driving towards an AlphaFold moment for developmental biology, enabling the scalable production of any cell, for anyone.”
In addition to Khosla Ventures, the funding round also included participation from SciFi VC, the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, Fusion Fund, Ajinomoto Group Ventures, Pitango HealthTech, TechAviv, and Harpoon Ventures, as well as angel investors. The funding will be used to advance Somite’s initial programs, which include developing beta cells for diabetes, articular cartilage for orthopedic use, satellite cells for muscular diseases, and hematopoietic cells for blood disorders.
“Traditional cell therapies are expensive, slow to develop, and unpredictable,” said Vinod Khosla. “AI can systematically solve these challenges. Somite AI’s foundation models, once fully developed and validated, will not only create value for their own pipeline, but have the potential to reshape the entire field of human cell therapy.”
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