• Digital health company iLoF is pioneering an AI platform to accelerate the future of personalized drug discovery and development.
• Its digital library of disease biomarkers and biological profiles is enabling biotechs and pharmaceutical companies to make clinical trials faster, cheaper, and patient-centric.
• This new funding round attracted world-class venture capital funds, including Faber, Lunar Ventures, Alter Venture Partners, M12, and renowned global angel investors.
• In addition to $4.1m in Seed funding, iLoF secured a $900k ERDF grant to accelerate its mission to save time and cost in recruiting patients for clinical trials and enable the fast development of life-saving therapeutics. 

Oxford, UK & Porto, Portugal, 08.00 AM BST 28th July 2022: iLoF has announced $5m in funding to support its vision of democratizing access to personalized medicine for millions of people living with complex diseases. Currently, iLoF’s intelligent platform is collecting massive amounts of data to build a library of biological profiles, bringing together world-class physicists, biologists, and data scientists to get life-saving personalized treatments to patients faster. 

The new funding round is comprised of $4.1m in equity investment led by Faber, alongside US-based M12, Microsoft’s venture fund and Quiet Capital, and EU-based Lunar Ventures, Alter Venture Partners, re.Mind Capital and Fluxunit, the corporate VC arm of ams OSRAM. Angel investor Charlie Songhurst, former GM at Microsoft, and Berggruen Holdings, the family office of Nicolas Berggruen, a serial investor and philanthropist, also participated. 

iLoF also secured a $900k grant from ERDF to accelerate and clinically validate its mission of cutting the time and cost of recruiting patients for clinical trials. Helping to remove the barriers to the development of personalized, effective, and life-saving therapeutics. The company has raised over $8M in funding to date.

Luis Valente, Co-Founder and CEO of iLoF, said, “For hundreds of years, treatments have been developed with the assumption they will work for everyone. However, each person is different, and for many severe diseases such as Alzheimer’s, multiple factors can contribute to the effectiveness of a treatment on a given patient.

Valente continued, “This means millions of patients currently live without access to an effective, disease-modifying treatment – which sparked the vision behind iLoF. We collect vast amounts of data to create digital twins of biological profiles and disease subtypes, which we store in our digital library. Different patient profiles can be selected and screened using our platform to speed up the development of effective and personalized treatments while enabling humane, patient-centric clinical trials.”

Sofia Santos, Partner at Faber, added, “iLoF has the potential to positively impact millions of patients around the globe and become an integral part of the $500B global personalized medicine market. Its unique combination of photonics and artificial intelligence can both directly impact the fast-growing AI in Drug Discovery Market and transform the diagnosis, staging, and triage of a myriad of diseases, progressively moving healthcare from a central hospital based-approach into a low-cost, distributed, patient-driven approach.”

iLoF’s platform amasses a wide range of optical signals, creating rich signatures of the ensemble of particles on biological samples, which are then converted into bio-digital twins. These bio-digital twins overcome the traditional limits of biochemical analysis, in which they can be re-analyzed a potentially infinite number of times. This supercharges the search for emergent features and patterns that could be the key to developing various novel therapeutics.

Mehak Mumtaz, Co-Founder and COO of iLoF added, “Our ultimate vision is to go from a next-generation bioinformatics platform to a breakthrough disease screening one. Moving from supporting researchers and scientists to directly helping patients around the world will vastly deepen our understanding of diseases and help physicians detect the world’s more severe and impactful diseases, such as Ovarian Cancer or Alzheimer’s Disease.”

During the pandemic, iLoF worked with St. John’s Hospital and the Faculty of Medicine in Porto to understand how the platform could help manage the influx of COVID-19 patients and optimize resources. iLoF was shown to be able to accurately distinguish COVID-19 patients based on their likelihood of ICU admission, which could allow hospitals to manage critical resources more effectively.

“In the midst of the accelerated pace of change brought on by the global pandemic, the need for personalized medicine solutions that serve each patient’s individual needs has never been more pressing,” said Priyanka Mitra, investor at M12, Microsoft’s venture fund. “iLoF’s cloud-based library of optical fingerprints is world-class technology built by an outstanding team that will help us usher in this new era of personalized patient care and healthcare delivery.”

This seed funding will be used to accelerate ongoing engagements with leading global corporations in the Pharmaceutical, Biotech, and Clinical space, with the aim of fast-tracking current and future pilots, enabling the further development of the iLoF Platform. 

Speaking on the investment in iLoF, Elad Verbin, Partner at Lunar Ventures, commented, “iLoF embodies the power of artificial intelligence to revolutionise healthcare as we know it. We are incredibly excited to back iLoF’s team of biologists, laser physicists and data scientists as they teach a computer how human blood looks at the nano-scale when affected by cancer or Alzheimer’s. Humanity urgently needs access to cheap, painless point-of-care diagnostics, and optical technology and machine learning are finally advanced and strong enough to provide this. iLoF is a frontrunner in leveraging these new optics and machine learning capabilities, providing an accurate early screening platform that improves the lives of tens of millions.”

iLoF is led by CEO Luis Valente, a serial entrepreneur and Forbes 30 under 30 for Science and Healthcare; COO Mehak Mumtaz, an Oxford University fellow and Biochemist PhD turned strategy and personalized medicine expert; and CSO Paula Sampaio, a renowned senior scientist and coordinator of a national bioimaging facility.

Initially formed while participating in EIT Health’s Wild Card programme and accelerated at the Oxford Foundry, the iLoF team consists of 20 international scientists, entrepreneurs, and inventors. 

Before 2023 iLoF will be hiring 20 people internationally across physics, data science, biology, and product management profiles. Most recently, the company hired Alex Turpin as Head of BioSignal and Analytics, an experienced physicist who spent the last decade leading projects at the interface of  AI, Data Science, and Photonics in world-class institutions around Europe. 

For more information, go to https://ilof.tech/

ENDS

Notes to Editors

Press Kit: Available Here

Press Contact:

Cathy White, CEW Communications for iLoF

[email protected] / +44 (0)7791 232834

About iLoF

iLoF is a digital health company pioneering a breakthrough AI platform to accelerate the future of personalized drug discovery and development.

Through advanced AI and Photonics, iLoF is collecting massive amounts of data to build a digital library of biomarkers and biological profiles, bringing together world-class physicists, biologists, and data scientists to get life-saving personalized treatments to patients faster. 

Recognized by CB Insights as one of the top Digital Health companies in the world and by the Financial Times as a Transformational Business in Healthcare, iLoF is supported by leading institutions including M12, Mayfield and Oxford University.

About Alter Venture Partners

Alter Venture Partners is an early-stage venture capital fund that partners with dynamic entrepreneurs who are passionate about solving challenging problems with innovative technology. Alter was founded by experienced operating executives and investment professionals from Telefonica, Comcast Ventures, Singtel Innov8, and Credit Suisse.  In addition to capital, Alter provides strategic insights, industry knowledge, operating experience, and an extensive global network of contacts to its portfolio companies. The fund’s focus areas include networking, mobility, cloud, data, ML/AI, and cyber security.

About Berggruen Holdings

Berggruen Holdings is the investment vehicle of the Nicolas Berggruen Charitable Trust. Over the last 20 years, we have made well over 100 investments using our proprietary capital. Our investments range from modest commitments to multimillion-dollar single transactions. At Berggruen Holdings, we work closely with our management teams, developers, and asset managers to identify appropriate investment opportunities. It is this strategy that has allowed Berggruen Holdings to invest globally across asset classes successfully. 

About Faber

Faber is a Lisbon-based venture capital firm investing in outstanding entrepreneurs who innovate at the intersection of science and technology to drive digital transformation and climate action. The firm combines a specialist focus on deep tech early-stage startups with dedicated funds, investment teams, and expert advisors to actively help founders build global companies powered by AI/data or Climate/Ocean Tech (pre-seed/ seed). Faber’s unique approach in Southern Europe is led by an entrepreneurial management partnership and backed by thesis-driven institutions and private investors. Investing since 2013, the firm has been an early investor in hard tech companies such as Unbabel, Seedrs, Codacy, SWORD Health, Smartex, iLoF or YData

About Fluxunit 

Fluxunit is the corporate venture capital arm of the ams OSRAM group. Backed by the world leader in photonics and optical solutions, Fluxunit invests in innovative products and technologies that have the potential to improve everyone’s daily life and impact ams OSRAM’s current and future business in sensing, illumination, visualization, computation and related fields. Fluxunit takes an active role in its portfolio companies and leverages ams OSRAM’s resources to help founders scale up and turn groundbreaking ideas into commercial success.

About Lunar Ventures

Lunar Ventures is an early-stage venture capital firm built by computer scientists and technical experts to invest into European DeepTech software startups. As technical investors, they partner with technical founders, who are building at the intersection of DeepTech and software. Its mission is to help founders turn their sci-fi ideas into working products. The team has made 12 investments across Europe into companies including Deepset, Molecule, Zama, and Mobius Labs.

About M12

M12, Microsoft’s venture fund, invests in early-stage enterprise software companies with a focus on applied AI, business applications, infrastructure, security, and vanguard technologies. Since 2016, M12 has invested in over 100 companies, helping startups accelerate growth with unparalleled access to Microsoft. With offices in San Francisco, Seattle, London, Tel Aviv, and Bengaluru, M12 has the team and resources to support entrepreneurs globally.

About re.Mind Capital

re.Mind Capital is the mental health VC arm of serial entrepreneur and investor Christian Angermayer and his family office Apeiron Investment Group. We seek out companies with innovative and highly impactful solutions to our global mental health crisis.

About Quiet Capital

Quiet Capital is a venture capital firm based in San Francisco, CA. The firm invests across all stages, but emphasizes seed, early, and early growth-stage companies. The firm invests in enterprise, consumer, fintech, marketplaces, deep tech, healthcare, and crypto companies.