INSUBCONTINENT EXCLUSIVE:
In the ongoing race to build the best and smartest applications that tap into the advances of artificial intelligence, a startup out of
London has raised a large round of funding to double down on solving persistent problems in areas like healthcare and energy
company that are using it specifically to break new ground in drug development and more.This venture round values the company at $2.1
billion post-money, its founder and executive chairman Ken Mulvaney confirmed to TechCrunch
Investors in this round include previous backer Woodford Investment Management, and while Mulvaney said the company was not disclosing the
names of any other investors, he added it was a mix of family offices and some strategic backers, with a majority coming from the U.S., but
would not specify any more
Notably, BenevolentAI does not have any backing from more traditional VCs, which more generally have been doubling down on investments in AI
reasons; Mulvaney said: There are 155 people working at the startup in all, with 300 projected by the end of this year
The brain has been created to ingest and compute billions of data points in specific areas such as health and material science, to help
scientists better determine combinations that might finally solve persistently difficult problems in fields like medicine.The crux of the
issue in a field like drug development, for example, is that even as scientists identify the many permutations and strains of, say, a
particular kind of cancer, each of these strains can mutate, and that is before you consider that each mutation might behave completely
differently depending on which person develops the mutation.This is precisely the kind of issue that AI, which is massive computational
(And BenevolventAI is not the only one taking this approach
The division of BenevolentAI that is focused on drugs, called Benevolent Bio, currently has two drugs in more advanced stages of
development, Mulvaney said, although neither of those happen to be in the area of cancer
expectancy.Some of the long period of development is because with drugs, there is a large regulatory framework a company must go through
Theranos are very different in terms of regulatory requirements, he said.)In part because of that long cycle, and also because BenevolentAI
that also tap into chemistry and biology, such as material science.One area Mulvaney said is of particular interest is to see if Benevolent
that could essentially create the next generation of efficient batteries that could provide more power in smaller formats for longer
have thousands of batteries working together
We need other technology to provide more energy donation
where the startup hopes to move into over the coming months and years include agriculture, veterinary science, and other categories that sit
