Helical closes $10M seed to turn bio foundation models into systems

This article was published on April 14, 2026 The Luxembourg-founded startup is already in production with multiple top-20 global pharma companies, including a public collaboration with Pfizer. Its $10M seed round is led by redalpine, with the CEOs of Cohere and HuggingFace among the angel investors. Helical, a London-based pharma AI startup founded by three Luxembourgish childhood friends, has raised $10 million in a seed round led by redalpine, with participation from Gradient, BoxGroup, and Frst. Notable angel investors include Aidan Gomez, CEO of Cohere; Clément Delangue, CEO of HuggingFace; and Mario Goetze, a professional footballer. The funding will support expansion across more top-20 pharma programmes and growth of Helical’s deployed science and engineering team. The company was founded by Rick Schneider, Maxime Allard, and Mathieu Klop, three school friends who took divergent paths into the same problem. Schneider built technology at Amazon before helping the German enterprise software company Celonis scale operations in France and Japan. Allard led data science teams at IBM before pursuing a PhD focused on reinforcement learning and robotics. Klop became a cardiologist an