Accelerating Scientific Discovery with AI: Our Investment in Causaly

“The characteristic of scientific progress is our knowing that we did not know” – Gaston Bachelard

By: Calvin Yeoh, Caroline Xie, and Seth Pierrepont | July 13, 2023

Causaly co-founders Yiannis Kiachopoulos and Artur Saudabayev.

The pharmaceutical industry has achieved monumental breakthroughs in revolutionizing healthcare, raising the quality of life for millions globally. Behind the scenes, however, the process of biomedical research itself remains highly manual and effort-intensive. Drug development timelines often span over a decade and scientists continually struggle to process the onslaught of data delivered by R&D.

At ICONIQ Growth, we believe effective scientific innovation and discoveries are rooted in comprehensive and timely access to information. In order to pursue research in an efficient manner, scientists should be empowered with both information at their fingertips and the ability to quickly gain a thorough understanding of new developments.

In that spirit, we’re proud to announce our partnership with Causaly, the London-based, AI-powered search engine and workspace for scientists. We are excited to lead Causaly’s $60 million Series B alongside existing investors Index Ventures, Pentech, Marathon, and EBRD, as well as new investors and experienced operators including Alex Gorsky (former Executive Chairman and CEO, Johnson & Johnson) and Olivier Pomel (CEO and co-founder, Datadog).

Causaly co-founder and CEO Yiannis Kiachopoulos captivated us with his enthusiasm and deep intellectual curiosity toward understanding the world and democratizing access to that knowledge. Together with Artur Saudabayev, Causaly’s co-founder and CTO, they created the engine underlying Causaly’s unique platform today, using AI at its core to extract and codify knowledge. In 2018, they founded Causaly to transform how humans find, visualize, and collaborate on scientific evidence, starting with drug discovery and life sciences as the initial frontier.

Leveraging AI, Causaly is able to codify how humans express relationships in natural languages. The platform automatically ingests and extracts knowledge across massive quantities of scientific literature, which are refined and represented hierarchically within its large and growing proprietary knowledge graph. A scientist would normally spend weeks poring through all of this literature and may still only scratch the surface—with Causaly, that same scientist can now ask questions in natural language and quickly get answers, with full traceability and auditability of results at every step. The value of Causaly’s technology is abundantly evident and resonates across its customer base, which includes 12 of the top 20 pharma companies, such as Novo Nordisk and Gilead.

At ICONIQ Growth, we are proud to be partnering with platforms accelerating life-saving therapies to patients including Benchling, Reify Health, Komodo Health, and Apprentice. Causaly’s platform enables scientists at the forefront of life sciences research and AI to continue pushing the very boundaries of science and drive significant acceleration across the drug development lifecycle.

We have long been supporters of the European technology ecosystem, and we are excited to continue deepening our commitment to entrepreneurs based in Europe with global ambitions such as Causaly.

We are thrilled to partner with Yiannis, Artur, and the entire Causaly team as they continue to enable and accelerate scientific research across life sciences and beyond.

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