UK Startup InstaDeep Nets $100M to Expand its AI-Decisioning Tools

London’s InstaDeep, a startup providing artificial intelligence (AI) decision making tools, has raised $100 million in a Series B round, according to a Tuesday (Jan. 25) press release.

The money will go toward bolstering its computing infrastructure, which is made for high-performance decision making applications. In addition, InstaDeep has plans to expand its global presence, increasing the size of its workforce and expanding its U.S. offerings.

The company’s technology has been used across several industries like biotech, logistics and electronics manufacturing — which the company also plans to focus more on with the new funding.

“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. “We are very excited to get the support of Alpha Intelligence Capital, Chimera, Synergie and Group42 as we see wide-ranging opportunities to deploy our AI products to tackle complex real-world problems.”

The release notes that InstaDeep’s AI tools work with GPU-accelerated computing, supporting its DeepChain and DeepPCB services. The former offers AI-boosted protein design which can show protein sequences with AI language models, while the latter is an AI-powered cloud native PCB designing service that can design complex boards in under a day.

PYMNTS wrote that InstaDeep has also recently debuted a warning tool to detect highest-risk COVID variants months in advance. InstaDeep worked on that tool with BioNTech, which helped to make one of the biggest COVID vaccines.

See also: BioNTech, AI Startup InstaDeep Develop COVID Warning Tool

The program was reportedly able to spot 90% of variants of concern, including omicron, around two months before the designation by the World Health Organization (WHO).

The research suggests the program can evaluate the risks of the variants using their spike proteins inside minutes, and then evaluate them in almost real time, according to BioNTech CEO Ugur Sahin.