* US-French health startup Owkin has raised $70 million in its Series A round from the likes of Alphabet's GV, F-Prime Capital, Mubadala Capital, and Bpifrance, a French investment bank.
* It extended the round by raising $18 million in June. It's raised a total of $73 million to date, including seed money.
* Owkin's unique approach to healthcare data allows scientists to learn from each other's research without actually sharing it with each other.
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Health startup Owkin has raised a $70 million funding round from the likes of Alphabet's GV, F-Prime Capital, French investment bank Bpifrance, and Mubadala Capital, the investment arm of Abu Dhabi's sovereign wealth fund.
Owkin is a French-American startup that deploys AI and federated learning for medical research. Pharmaceutical companies can use an algorithm to search rival companies' data without revealing any commercial advantage by using Owkin's blockchain platform.
The startup has extended its Series A round a couple of times, most recently to raise $18 million from Mubadala and Bpifrance. In May, another extension won the company $25 million from Cathay Innovation and MACSF, GV, F-Prime Capital, and Eight Roads. To date, it's raised $73 million counting seed money, Owkin told BI.
Read more: Investors just put $18 million into a GV-backed startup taking the opposite approach to healthcare data storage as Amazon, Microsoft, and Google.
The company, which has roughly 98 staff, wants to deploy the funds towards expanding to more countries, hiring more people, and building centers that academic institutions sometimes need in order to use the company's software, Thomas Clozel, the cofounder and CEO, told Business Insider.
"We need more money to build more software and our AI tools which are our superpowers to find solutions in clinical science," he said.
It's also scaling its coronavirus research effort, which so far has helped providers in four European countries better understand which patients become critical, Clozel said.
Owkin launched the COVID-19 Open AI Consortium (COAI) during the pandemic. It combines the company's platform and technology to help advance collaborative research around the novel coronavirus.
"You'd think that COVID would lower the risk of silos," Clozel added. "But in some ways it's the opposite, everyone wants to be first, you don't even need to peer review scientific papers to get into media. Our consortium is about merging intelligence not data sets and is helping to answer specific questions."
Check out Owkin's pitch deck below, which it used for its Series A extension in May:
(This article was updated on June 30 with Owkin's latest funding.)
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