Our European Ventures team has invested in Owkin, a health-tech company using machine learning technologies and infrastructure to enable breakthrough medical research. The investment was made alongside our colleagues in the US at F-Prime Capital, as well as Owkin’s existing investors GV, Cathay Innovation and NJF Capital.

Owkin has offices in New York and Paris and was founded in 2016 by a team of clinicians, life scientists, data scientists and engineers. Parker Moss, former Eight Roads/F-Prime Entrepreneur in Residence, has just joined Owkin as Chief Business Officer. His previous experience within the NHS and as CTO of Virgin Care also promises to strengthen the company’s partnerships with hospitals, academic centres, pharmaceutical and biotechs.

Owkin is already delivering breakthrough insights for pharmaceutical companies and hospitals. Its federated approach enables universal access to intelligence trained on real-world data. Rather than bringing data to the algorithms, Owkin sends algorithms to the data, which extract and centralise the knowledge from the data without ever taking it out of the hospitals. Owkin’s hospital partner network is the first at-scale solution that enables federated learning for the healthcare industry. Its flagship technology platform, Socrates, allows pharmaceutical researchers to train production level predictive models on heterogeneous real-world data, all while preserving patient privacy. This optimises drug development at every stage, from survival prognosis to target discovery, patient recruitment and stratification for clinical trials, to post-market analysis.

With this additional funding, Owkin is looking to grow its team, expand its global partner network, and further deploy its machine learning platform. We’re grateful to Thomas Clozel and Gilles Wainrib and the whole Owkin team for allowing us to be a part of their story and look forward to joining them on their mission.