When AI Meets Biology: How One Startup Just Cracked the $300M Valuation Code

Inceptive—a Palo Alto biotech founded just 4 years ago—just did what most biotech dreams of: tripled its valuation from $100M (2021) to $300M+ in its latest funding round, backed by Nvidia and Andreessen Horowitz.

Here’s the plot twist: the company’s secret sauce isn’t a blockbuster drug. It’s biological software.

Jakob Uszkoreit, who spent years at Google building AI systems, is essentially treating human cells like programmable computers. Inceptive’s AI platform designs custom mRNA molecules—yes, the same tech behind Pfizer and BioNTech’s Covid vaccines—and licenses them to pharma giants for clinical testing.

Why this matters:

The biotech-AI convergence is real. Over 700 mRNA drug programs are expected by 2030, and VCs are pouring billions into startups like Exscientia, Verge Genomics, and Recursion Pharmaceuticals that use AI to accelerate drug discovery. The sector is eyeing a $50 billion market opportunity.

But here’s the catch: mRNA vaccines crushed it against Covid. Replicating that success across other disease categories? Still a mystery. That’s where Inceptive’s current collaboration with a major European pharma on an infectious disease vaccine comes in—a real-world test of whether AI-designed biology actually works at scale.

Nvidia’s involvement is telling too. NVentures didn’t just write a check; they’re providing computing infrastructure and chips—essentially betting that AI-powered drug design will consume serious GPU horsepower.

The real question: Can software-defined biology escape the lab and survive clinical trials? If yes, this isn’t just another biotech story—it’s the beginning of programmable medicine.