LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman grew to become a billionaire when Microsoft purchased LinkedIn in 2016 for $26.2 billion in money, and he has additionally made his fortune on high-return investments in additional than 80 tech startups, together with Airbnb, Groupon, and Flickr. He famously made $111 million from his preliminary $37,500 funding in Fb.
Now Hoffman is popping his consideration to AI in healthcare with a brand new startup he launched final week with co-founder Dr. Siddhartha Mukherjee: Manas AI. And this time Hoffman has deeper hopes than only a excessive return on funding — he needs to assist remedy most cancers.
Manas is bringing AI to among the world’s prime drug improvement scientists to deepen their experience and velocity up the speed at which new medicine are found. The startup goals to unite researchers with superior AI techniques to extra shortly determine how probably life-saving medicine might work together with the human physique.
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Manas is initially turning its consideration to aggressive cancers like breast most cancers, prostate most cancers, and lymphoma. Its long-term imaginative and prescient is to basically change how the business discovers and develops new medicines.
“Most individuals have had buddies, members of the family, and many others., who’ve died from most cancers or had critical most cancers issues,” Hoffman advised CNBC on Monday. “If we are able to make an enormous distinction on this, and that is the form of factor that AI could make an enormous distinction in, it is the form of cause why AI might be nice for humanity.”
Reid Hoffman The Halfway SF on December 05, 2023, in San Francisco, California. Picture by Kimberly White/Getty Photographs for WIRED
The startup has raised $24.6 million in seed funding to this point, with Hoffman main the funding spherical with enterprise capital agency Normal Catalyst. It is going to function its AI techniques in knowledge facilities owned by Microsoft.
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Mukherjee is a Columbia College professor and writer of “The Emperor of All Maladies,” a e book about most cancers. In 2016, he helped discovered Vor BioPharma, a cell engineering firm, and in 2021 he based Myeloid Therapeutics, a most cancers remedy startup.
Manas at the moment has 4 staff together with Mukherjee and Hoffman, with Hoffman saying he serves as the corporate’s “AI man” and Mukherjee because the “bio man.” Manas’ objective is to unite the 2 fields.
“It is not simply the perfect of science and it is not simply the perfect of AI, as a result of both of these two [is] inadequate,” Hoffman advised CNBC. “It’s worthwhile to put these two collectively.”
The AI healthcare sector noticed substantial investments in 2024. In line with PitchBook, traders poured $10.5 billion into 511 healthcare AI offers in 2024. Most cancers screening AI startup Freenome raised essentially the most cash out of the group with a $254 million Sequence F in February 2024.