Fundraising Fox
Owkin
also invests · investor profileUnicorn · $1BPlug and Play VenturesSilicon Valley, FR · Founded 2016 · 423 employees on LinkedIn · 9 known investors
Find your way into Owkin
Each arrow is one introduction. Sign up to fill in the first one.
Ask Raffaele Colella to introduce you to Thomas Clozel
You →Raffaele · together at Spot - justspot.io →Thomas
Sign up to find every way you can get introduced to Owkin
- Your email: who you already know at Owkin, and who your contacts know
- 2nd- and 3rd-degree connections: people you know who worked, studied or invested with the Owkin team
- Your LinkedIn: the connections who can make the intro for you
We rank every route by how warm it is, so you raise on warm intros instead of cold emails.
Owkin develops AI Scientist, an autonomous AI system that uses biological large language models and multimodal patient data to accelerate drug discovery for pharmaceutical and biotech companies. The company aims to automate early-stage R&D and compress decades of discovery timelines into years.
Also known as Owkin
Founders & leadership
Owkin was founded in 2016 by Thomas Clozel and Gilles Wainrib.
Investors · 9
How we know: Cathay Innovation's portfolio page · the VCSheet dataset · Not right? Tell us
How we know: F-Prime Capital's portfolio page · Not right? Tell us
How we know: Frst's portfolio page · the VCSheet dataset · open dataset · 5k.vc investor directory · Not right? Tell us
How we know: GV (Google Ventures)'s portfolio page · open dataset · 5k.vc investor directory · Not right? Tell us
How we know: funding news · Not right? Tell us
How we know: funding news · Not right? Tell us
How we know: open dataset · Top 3000 Accelerator Startups (no YC) 2026-08 · Not right? Tell us
Company profile
researched Sep 2026Owkin is a French-American artificial intelligence and biotech company that builds agentic AI to analyze biomedical data, identify new treatments, optimize clinical trials and develop AI diagnostics. It uses multimodal patient data sourced from academic institutions and hospitals to train models for data analysis, drug discovery and drug development, and works with pharmaceutical companies on their therapeutic programs.
The company's central product is K Pro, an intelligent research agent released in May 2025 that combines AI with multiomics data to generate insights across biopharmaceutical R&D. K Pro features include user data upload, a biomedical skills library, biological tissue visualization and cell identification, data licensing and a data explorer, accessed through a natural language interface that lets scientists interact conversationally with scientific literature and their own data. A free tier, K Pro Free, is also listed among its products. Owkin describes K Pro as an AI scientist that orchestrates a suite of AI skills and tools, with human scientists shaping hypotheses and decisions, and states a long-term goal of developing a biological artificial superintelligence capable of causal understanding of disease.
Beyond software, Owkin operates wet lab infrastructure used to explore and validate AI-generated findings, and works with a network of oncologists and biologists whose feedback is fed back into its models. A published case study covers OKN3201, described as a potential first-in-class bispecific antibody-drug conjugate for solid tumors designed with AI and validated in Owkin's wet lab.
Founding story
The company was founded in Paris in 2016 by Thomas Clozel, a clinical research doctor whose parents founded the Swiss biotech Actelion, and Gilles Wainrib, a professor of artificial intelligence.
Business model
Owkin licenses its K Pro agentic AI platform and multimodal patient data to pharmaceutical companies, and enters research collaborations and strategic alliances in which partners apply its AI to biomarker discovery, therapeutic target identification, prognostic modeling, treatment response prediction and clinical trial design. Announced arrangements include multi-year software licenses (for example three-year K Pro licenses with AstraZeneca and Sanofi), data licensing, and equity plus partnership structures such as the Sanofi alliance that combined a $180 million equity investment with a $90 million discovery and development partnership.
Revenue is generated from licensing K Pro and multimodal patient data to biopharmaceutical companies and from discovery and development partnerships with pharmaceutical partners; a free tier, K Pro Free, is also offered.
Traction
Owkin reports over $308 million raised and unicorn status since November 2021, roughly 250 employees in 2026, and partnerships or licensing agreements with Sanofi, AstraZeneca, Bristol-Myers Squibb, Amgen, Servier and Compugen. Its K Pro product launched in May 2025 and the MOSAIC consortium spans several academic hospitals and universities in the US and Europe.
Latest developments
In May 2026 AstraZeneca signed an agentic AI licensing deal with Owkin covering AI agent development and a three-year K Pro license, and Sanofi signed a comparable 2026 agreement pairing AI agent development with a three-year K Pro license. In September 2026 Owkin announced it would license K Pro and multimodal data to Servier for oncology research, and published a blog on Compugen's selection of K Pro to complement its in-house AI discovery platform. The company also published a case study on OKN3201, a bispecific ADC candidate for solid tumors validated in its wet lab.
▸Full profile — market position, technology, go-to-market, geography, history
Market position
Owkin is described as an AI biotech unicorn and operates in the AI-driven drug discovery segment alongside other AI-first drug discovery companies; it has secured alliances with several large pharmaceutical companies.
Owkin positions its multimodal patient data network, assembled from academic institutions and hospitals, as the basis for its AI models, combined with in-house wet lab validation, a clinician and biologist review network, privacy-preserving federated learning that allows collaboration without data transfer, and transfer learning methods suited to small datasets.
Technology
Owkin's technology stack combines agentic AI, large language models and multimodal patient data. Its K Pro agent supports researchers in exploring, refining and validating hypotheses via a natural language interface. OwkinZero is a biological reasoning model trained on a proprietary question-and-answer dataset created from the MOSAIC platform, which Owkin reports outperformed several other large language models, including ChatGPT, on biological reasoning tasks. MOSAIC (Multi Omic Spatial Atlas in Cancer) aims to build one of the largest spatial multiomics datasets in oncology, in collaboration with Nanostring Technologies, the University of Pittsburgh, Gustave Roussy, Lausanne University Hospital, Uniklinikum Erlangen/Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg and Charité-Universitätsmedizin Berlin. Owkin also applies federated learning, a decentralized technique that lets multiple data providers train shared models without moving or sharing their data, as in the MELLODDY consortium, and transfer learning, including its CHOWDER model for recognizing high-level image patterns such as tumors from small datasets.
Go-to-market
Owkin sells directly to biopharma through strategic alliances and multi-year platform licensing deals, supported by product demos, published case studies, blog and press-release content, newsletters, explainer videos and conference presence such as BiotechX EU.
Pharmaceutical and biotech companies, and the researchers, scientists, oncologists and biologists working in biopharmaceutical R&D and clinical research. Named partners and customers include Sanofi, AstraZeneca, Bristol-Myers Squibb, Amgen, Servier and Compugen.
Geography
Headquartered in Paris, France, with areas served including the United States, France, the United Kingdom, Switzerland, Germany and Spain. Internships and part of the team are based at the Paris office, and staff have flexible office, hybrid and remote working options.
History
Owkin was founded in Paris on 3 August 2016 by Thomas Clozel, a clinical research doctor and son of Jean-Paul and Martine Clozel, founders of Swiss biotech Actelion, and Gilles Wainrib, a professor of artificial intelligence. The company has raised over $308 million and reached unicorn status — a valuation above $1 billion — in November 2021 through a $180 million investment from Sanofi that accompanied a strategic alliance. It subsequently signed alliances with Bristol-Myers Squibb (June 2022) and AstraZeneca (2024), released its K Pro research agent in May 2025, and in 2026 signed agentic AI and K Pro licensing agreements with AstraZeneca, Sanofi and Servier.
Compiled by commissioned research from 8 cited public sources — announcements, filings, and press listed under research sources below.
Key figures
latest reportedCompany-reported or press-reported figures, each dated to when it was claimed — not independently audited.
Founder mafia
The Owkin mafia →8 people who came through Owkin went on to found or lead other companies.
Related companies · 1
Companies working in the same space as Owkin.
Timeline · 8
launches, deals, and filingsOwkin published that Compugen chose K Pro to complement its in-house AI discovery platform.
Owkin announced it would license K Pro and multimodal data to Servier to advance oncology research.
AstraZeneca agreed with Owkin to build AI agents alongside a three-year license for K Pro.
Sanofi partnered with Owkin to build AI agents in addition to a three-year license for K Pro.
Owkin first released K Pro, an intelligent research agent using AI and multiomics data, with features including user data upload, a biomedical skills library, tissue visualization and cell identification, data licensing and a data explorer.
Owkin and AstraZeneca partnered to develop an AI-powered tool to prescreen for gBRCA mutations using digital pathology slides, aiming to speed up and broaden access to testing.
Owkin entered an alliance with Bristol-Myers Squibb to help design more precise and efficient clinical trials, initially focused on cardiovascular disease with potential to expand to other therapeutic areas.
Owkin entered a strategic alliance with Sanofi comprising a $180 million equity investment and a $90 million discovery and development partnership focused on Sanofi's oncology efforts in four cancers; Sanofi used Owkin's technology to find biomarkers and therapeutic targets, build prognostic models and predict treatment response.
$90M source ↗
Dated company events from announcements, filings, and press; legal rows summarize public dockets and regulator releases.
In the news
▸Research sources · 8
primary sources listed
- AI biotechowkin.com · web
8 public sources were cited for this profile; the first-party ones are listed here.
Frequently asked questions
- What does Owkin do?
- French-American AI biotech building K Pro, an agentic AI scientist for biopharma R&D trained on multimodal patient data.
- Who founded Owkin?
- Owkin was founded by Thomas Clozel, Gilles Wainrib in 2016.
- Who are Owkin's investors?
- Owkin's investors include Bridford Investments (Bridford Group), Cathay Innovation, F-Prime Capital, Frst, GV (Google Ventures), Alpha Intelligence Capital, OTB Ventures, Plug and Play Ventures and 1 more.
- Where is Owkin headquartered?
- Owkin is headquartered in Silicon Valley, FR.