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Business Wire
a day ago
- Business
- Business Wire
Tahoe Therapeutics Raises $30M to Build World's Largest Dataset for Training AI Models of Human Cell
SAN FRANCISCO--(BUSINESS WIRE)-- Tahoe Therapeutics today announced $30 million in new funding to build the definitive foundational dataset for training Virtual Cell Models. With this, the team will generate one billion single-cell datapoints, mapping one million drug-patient interactions, a scale previously impossible. The dataset will support the discovery of new precision medicines for cancer and beyond. Tahoe will also select a single partner to share the data and accelerate translation to clinical outcomes. The round was led by Amplify Partners, joined by a distinguished group of investors including Databricks Ventures, Wing Venture Capital, General Catalyst, Civilization Ventures, Conviction, Mubadala Capital Ventures, and AIX Ventures. The raise follows the release of Tahoe‑100M, the world's first gigascale perturbative single-cell dataset, which has become foundational for teams building virtual cell models, ranging from major AI labs to focused research institutions. Open-sourced just a few months ago, Tahoe-100M has been downloaded nearly 100,000 times. The dataset and the models trained on it have already led to the discovery of promising new therapeutic candidates for major cancer subtypes as well as novel targets across multiple modalities. Tahoe is now expanding on that foundation: the company plans to generate one billion single-cell datapoints, mapping how tens of thousands of drug molecules interact with human biology. This new dataset will expand the boundaries of biological foundation models, aiming to reduce clinical trial failure rates and accelerate the development of precision medicines. 'Building Tahoe-100M required us to invent new ways to generate single-cell data,' said Nima Alidoust, co-founder and CEO of Tahoe Therapeutics. 'Now, we're applying that superpower to go 10x further. This next phase is about using these massive datasets to bring about the GPT moment for AI models of human cells, translating insights to clinical readouts, and developing new medicines with much lower clinical failure rates.' With the new capital, Tahoe is advancing its own therapeutic programs toward the clinic, while also launching a new model of strategic collaboration. The company will select a single partner, a pharmaceutical or AI company with complementary strengths, to access the forthcoming dataset. Together, the goal is to develop the first medicines powered by virtual cell models, combining Tahoe's data with the partner's clinical or modeling expertise. 'While structural models have accelerated molecular design, they rarely translate to clinical success — a problem that remains one of the biggest challenges in drug development,' said Sunil Dhaliwal, General Partner at Amplify Partners. 'Tahoe Therapeutics is uniquely positioned to move the industry past this bottleneck by generating massive drug-patient datasets and training high-dimensional, cell-based AI models. We're proud to back this exceptional team as they combine biology and computation to accelerate clinical impact.' Tahoe founders, Nima Alidoust, Johnny Yu, Hani Goodzari, and Kevan Shokat hold deep experience in single-cell genomics, ML, and drug discovery. The company's platform makes large-scale, single-cell drug screening across diverse patient contexts not only possible, but scalable. Built on scientific breakthroughs at UCSF, Tahoe is creating the raw materials needed to train disease-relevant foundation models of human cells and chart a new course for precision medicine. To learn more, visit: About Tahoe Therapeutics Tahoe Therapeutics is building AI-powered models of the human cell to design better drugs for more patients. Its technology platform generates large-scale, perturbative single-cell datasets that enable a new generation of biological foundation models. Based in South San Francisco, Tahoe was founded by a team of scientists and technologists advancing the frontiers of drug discovery, genomics, and machine learning.
Forbes
a day ago
- Business
- Forbes
Biotech Startup Tahoe Therapeutics Raised $30 Million To Build AI Models Of Living Cells
Tahoe cofounders (L-R): Kevin Shokat, Nima Alidoust, Johnny Yu and Hani Goodarzi Tahoe Therapeutics O ne of the holy grails of biology is digitally simulating a living cell. If researchers can use computers to more accurately understand how new medicines would react in the body, that could give them greater confidence when they're tested on animals and humans. But while large language models have led to breakthroughs in modeling how proteins act, applying the same technology to simulating all the complexities of an entire cell hasn't been as fruitful. There's simply not enough data. But in February of this year, a startup named Tahoe Therapeutics got one step closer to that goal with the release of Tahoe-100M, a collection of 100 million different datapoints showing how different kinds of cancer cells responded to interactions with over 1,000 different molecules. This type of data–called pertubations–is crucial to training AI models, because information on how cells respond to various molecules improves an algorithm's ability to predict how they'll be affected by others. 'We believe that the Tahoe-100M was a Mars landing moment for single-cell datasets,' Tahoe CEO Nima Alidoust, 39, told Forbes . The company was able to build this dataset less than three years after it was founded thanks to its Mosaic platform, which lets the company take 'cells from many different types of patients, from all different organs and then put them together,' rather than the conventional techniques, which test cells from only one individual at a time, explained CSO and cofounder Johnny Yu. 'So every time we run an experiment, we're generating massive single cell atlases of which drugs affect which patients.' 'Our core superpower is the ability to generate the massive datasets required for virtual cell models,' Alidoust said. The ability to scale that data production quickly, he added, is Tahoe's 'distinguishing factor' compared to other companies working on AI for drug discovery. It's also foundational to the company's own goal of building virtual cell models and using them to find new treatments for cancer and other diseases. Today, Tahoe announced it has raised $30 million in new venture funding, led by Amplify Partners. Other investors include Databricks Ventures, Wing Venture Capital, General Catalyst, AIX Ventures, Mubdala Ventures, Civilization Ventures and Conviction. The investment brings the company's total funding to $42 million and its valuation to $120 million. Poor AI predictions have been a source of constant frustration in biotech, said Krish Ramadurai, a partner at AIX Ventures who also sits on Tahoe's board. 'These AI algorithms keep recommending stuff, and then when you go to test it in the wet lab, it all sucks,' he said. The data Tahoe can generate, he said, makes a crucial difference for the accuracy of new models. Just a few months after Tahoe published its 100 million point dataset, the non-profit research organization Arc Institute released an open-source virtual cell model, State, which used Tahoe-100M as part of its training data. When benchmarked, Arc found that it has twice the accuracy of other AI models–and also beat out the simpler machine learning programs that had previously trounced other foundation models. That's a testament to nearly a decade's worth of work for Tahoe cofounder Yu, 34, who developed the underlying technology for Mosaic, while working in the lab of biochemistry and biophysics professor Hani Goodarzi at the University of California San Francisco. Alidoust first met Goodarzi, 41, when they were classmates at Princeton. The pair reconnected in 2022 to discuss the idea of founding a company to build virtual cell models. Goodarzi said that an essential piece of such a company would be large-scale data collection, so he brought in Yu. A month later, the three of them cofounded Tahoe–then called Vevo Therapuetics–along with UCSF researcher Kevin Shokat, 60. The company raised a $12 million seed round in December 2022. The name was changed from Vevo to Tahoe in April of this year after a legal challenge. With new capital in hand, Tahoe is now focused on building a dataset with over a billion single-cell datapoints to power its own virtual cell models. Armed with its own models and proprietary data, the company is accelerating the development of new medicines to fight cancer. Alidoust said Tahoe currently has a drug candidate against 'a major cancer subtype' with which it's conducting the studies required by the FDA to start testing on humans. Additionally, Alidoust said, although the company intends to keep its larger datasets proprietary, it does plan to select either a major pharmaceutical company or AI company to share data with. The idea would be to collaborate on either developing new medicines or new drug discovery AI models, giving Tahoe 'more shots on goal' for gaining revenue. That partner hasn't been selected yet, he said, but it is currently working with different companies on smaller projects. In the meantime, he said, the company will keep working on generating more data for its AI models and proving out its technology. 'We say in the company that this is morning in biology,' he said. 'We are building. And we hope others are going to build with us as well.' MORE AT FORBES: Forbes How AI And Mini-Organs Could Replace Testing Drugs On Animals By Alex Knapp Forbes MIT Spinout Strand Therapeutics Raises $153 Million To Make Cancerous Tumors Light Up By Amy Feldman Forbes This AI Founder Became A Billionaire By Building ChatGPT For Doctors By Amy Feldman Forbes As Trump Cuts Cancer Research Funding, Billionaire Sean Parker Wants To Scale It Up By Alex Knapp
Associated Press
25-02-2025
- Science
- Associated Press
Vevo Therapeutics Open Sources Tahoe-100M, the World's Largest Single-Cell Dataset, as the Inaugural Contribution to Arc Institute's New Virtual Cell Atlas
300 million single cell atlas now accessible to the scientific community comprised of Vevo's Tahoe-100M, mapping 60,000 drug-patient interactions, and Arc's AI-curated scBaseCamp 200 million cell dataset Generated using Vevo's Mosaic platform, Tahoe-100M leveraged Parse Biosciences' GigaLab for single cell sample preparation and Ultima Genomics for sequencing. PALO ALTO, Calif. and SOUTH SAN FRANCISCO, Calif., Feb. 25, 2025 /PRNewswire/ -- In a landmark move to advance AI-driven biological research, Arc Institute and Vevo Therapeutics announced today that they have partnered on the first release of the Arc Virtual Cell Atlas—the largest and most biologically diverse public resource for single-cell transcriptomic data across species, tissues, and experimental and perturbation conditions, starting with data from over 300 million unique cells. This data is open source and freely accessible via Arc's website as of February 25, 2025. The atlas currently includes single-cell gene expression data from two massive datasets: Vevo's Tahoe-100M, is the world's largest single-cell dataset, 50x larger than all public drug-perturbed data combined. It includes 100 million cells and maps 60,000 drug-patient interactions, measuring cellular response across 50 cancer cell lines to 1,200 drug perturbations. Tahoe-100M was generated using Vevo's Mosaic Technology, the first platform to make pan-cancer testing of drugs at single cell resolution scalable, and with support from Parse Biosciences' GigaLab leveraging its single-cell RNA sequencing capabilities. Arc's scBaseCamp is the first single-cell RNA sequencing data repository from public data to be curated and reprocessed at scale using AI agents. This gene expression data from another 200 million cells from 21 different species was sourced from public repositories and has been standardized to ensure interoperability for optimal use by machine learning models. 'What makes the Arc Virtual Cell Atlas particularly powerful is not just its scale, but that now researchers can analyze together both observational natural cell states and cells that have been deliberately perturbed by drugs or chemicals to see how they respond,' says Dave Burke ( @davey_burke) Arc Institute's Chief Technology Officer. 'We're grateful to partner with Vevo on our first release of this resource, leveraging their large-scale Tahoe-100M cell dataset, which is crucial for developing predictive models that can simulate cellular responses to perturbations, potentially reducing years of laboratory work to computational queries that take minutes.' 'Something extraordinary happened in the last few years: emergence of AI models that can predict protein structure and function,' says Nima Alidoust ( @nalidoust), Chief Executive Officer and Co-founder of Vevo Therapeutics. 'Our mission at Vevo is to go a huge step further: build AI models of human cells to predict how diseased cells interact with potential drug molecules.' 'These models need massive amounts of observational and drug-perturbed single-cell data, leaps beyond what is publicly available today,' says Johnny Yu, Chief Scientific Officer at Vevo. 'Our Mosaic platform overcomes this fundamental challenge; it can generate single-cell datasets such as Tahoe-100M at a scale that was not possible before.' 'We are open sourcing Tahoe-100M to help start a new movement in biological modeling that goes beyond us,' says Alidoust. 'Releasing it on Arc's Virtual Cell Atlas is the obvious choice as it aims to precisely do that.' The Arc Virtual Cell Atlas is now accessible on this portal: Arc's scBaseCamp Technical Report: About the Arc Institute The Arc Institute ( @arcinstitute) is an independent nonprofit research organization located in Palo Alto, California, that aims to accelerate scientific progress and understand the root causes of complex diseases. Arc's model gives scientists complete freedom to pursue curiosity-driven research agendas and fosters deep interdisciplinary collaboration. About Vevo Therapeutics Vevo Therapeutics is a biotechnology company using its in vivo drug discovery platform and next-generation AI models to uncover better drugs for more patients. The company's Mosaic platform is the first to make multi-patient drug screening data scalable, with single-cell precision, to better represent patient diversity in drug response. Vevo is using Mosaic to build the world's largest atlas of how drugs interact with patient cells and to train disease-relevant models of human cells for discovering novel targets and drugs undetectable by other technologies. Located in South San Francisco, CA, Vevo was founded by a team of inventors and thought leaders who have discovered drugs for 'undruggable' targets and invented novel methods in genomics, computational biology, and chemistry. Learn more at and follow us on LinkedIn and X.
