Jan 25, 2022

Tunisian artificial intelligence start-up InstaDeep announced that it raised $100 million and closed a successful Series B funding round led by Alpha Intelligence Capital and CDIB Capital International. The firm is focused on decision-making AI systems and will use this capital injection to hire more elite talent and expand its global prescence into the US. InstaDeep plans to accelerate the launch of disruptive AI products across multiple industries including biotech, logistics, transportation and electronics manufacturing. BioNTech, Chimera Abu Dhabi, DB Digital Ventures, Google, G42 and Synergie also participated in the funding round that will allow the company to harness AI technologies such as Reinforcement Learning, a type of machine learning that helps design effective optimization strategies for an array of challenges, from therapeutics development to railway operations and more. What started as an enthusiastic project to boost local AI communities in 2014 quickly grew from the two laptops of the founders into an influential organisation with a legion engineers and researchers in Tunisia, South Africa, Nigeria, the UAE and teams in France and the UK. “This funding round is a tremendous vote of confidence from our partners BioNTech, Google and Deutsche Bahn after working closely with us on innovative, high-impact AI initiatives” said Karim Beguir, Co-Founder and CEO of InstaDeep. “And we are very excited to get the support of Alpha Intelligence Capital, Chimera, Synergie and G42 as we see wide-ranging opportunities to deploy our AI products to tackle complex real-world problems.” InstaDeep and BioNTech have been strategic collaborators since the pairing launched a joint AI innovation lab in 2020 to deploy AI and machine learning techniques in immunotherapy development. One product this partnership created is an early warning system that detects high-risk SARS-CoV-2 variants. The AI-driven system detected Omicron and other WHO designated variants The AI-driven system detected Omicron when the sequence was made available and had already detected almost all of the WHO designated variants of concern about two months ahead of time. Google and Deutsche Bahn (DB Digital Ventures) are also collaborators through respective joint research publishing with DeepMind and Google Research, and a project that will automate railway scheduling. “As the first global fund fully dedicated to artificial intelligence and machine learning, we are particularly proud to have led this Series B round, together with first class co-investors,” says Alpha Intelligence Capital partner and COO Arnaud Barthelemy. “InstaDeep is a deep technology company that disrupts traditional approaches in crucial areas as they do with BioNTech for drug discovery or with Deutsche Bahn for railway scheduling. We are thrilled to join this exciting adventure and eager to help support InstaDeep’s growth through our unique AI expertise.” The company was supported by law firm CMS during this fundraising round.