The Greek ML startup Causaly just raised $17M in Series A in a round led by the international Index Ventures, with the participation of the Greek Marathon Ventures. Marathon Ventures led the first seed investment of Causaly together with early-stage software VC Pentech and the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD).
Causaly aims to shorten and simplify the R&D process of finding new drugs and preparing them for commercial use. They develop a platform that maps the correlations across vast amounts of scientific data. This helps medical professionals, experts, and innovators to focus on developing novel medicine instead of spending months looking for data correlations. Causaly uses ML and AI to go through existing scientific literature and clinical trial documents. It “reads” the publications, identifies cause and effect relationships, and then transforms that data and insights in a way that allows researchers to ask complex questions and get timely answers.
The founders Yiannis Kiachopoulos (CEO), and Artur Saudabayev (CTO) combine expertise in consulting, computer science, and Neuro-linguistic programming (NLP). It came natural for them to identify the opportunity for machine learning and human intelligence to work together.
The company plans to use the latest round to expand its technology and sales departments. The startup has around 40 employees, distributed in its HQ in London and their office in Athens.
Shaping the tomorrow of drug development
Causaly is already working with 9 global pharmaceutical companies including the Swiss Novartis and collaborates with research labs such as University College London and King’s College London. Their plan is to triple the size of their team in the next couple of years. The goal of the startup is to expand to the US and improve its capacity to work with more clients and generate more insights from private data sources.
