DCVC Leads $14 Million Seed Round for Noetik

We are thrilled to announce DCVC has led a $14 million seed financing round for Noetik (and see Endpoints coverage here), a compu­ta­tion­ally driven company employing broad and novel AI to give humanity the edge in its fight against cancer. Noetik is using spatial biology and machine learning to unravel the complex circuitry of cancer, and aims to empower phar­ma­ceutic teams to develop better cancer treatments that have a higher probability of clinical success.

At DCVC, we back deep tech entre­pre­neurs aiming to solve the world’s highest-stakes problems, and Noetik is a perfect fit with our mission. Noetik’s focus on applying these powerful tech­nolo­gies to dramat­i­cally improve our under­standing of cancer is aligned with our mission to transform health with data, enabling break­throughs in precision oncology and beyond. 

Noetik’s innovative approach is part of a revolution to dramat­i­cally improve the prediction of clinical outcomes during early-stage cancer treatment. 

Noetik is building one of the highest resolution, highest dimen­sion­ality, highest quality differ­en­ti­ated human oncology datasets, designed specif­i­cally for machine learning. The combination of Noetik’s proprietary combination of spatial biology and unique AI unveils the physical orga­ni­za­tion and spatial rela­tion­ships of cells and molecules within tumor tissue. Once this precise map is generated, Noetik’s powerful compu­ta­tional platform determines the underlying biological drivers of cancer and predicts which therapies are most likely to be effective.

In less than 12 months of operation, Noetik has analyzed over 1,000 human lung cancer samples, generating a data stack that includes a unified rela­tion­ship set in great detail across genomics, tran­scrip­tomics, and proteomics domains, all referencing spatial location and biological function. In that time, they have also scaled to 18 employees, including CTO Lacey Padron, who was VP of Bioin­for­matics at the Parker Institute for Cancer Immunotherapy.

Our investment in Noetik demon­strates DCVC’s long-term belief in AI’s immense potential across healthcare. As capa­bil­i­ties like machine learning and spatial biology continue to advance, AI-centric companies will emerge to solve major problems across drug discovery, diagnostics, person­al­ized medicine, and more. We anticipate further ground­breaking new tech­nolo­gies at the inter­sec­tion of AI and life sciences.

We are excited to support Noetik Co-Founders Ron Alfa and Jacob Rinaldi, with whom we have a long-standing rela­tion­ship. Ron and Jacob were executives at DCVC-backed Recursion Phar­ma­ceu­ti­cals, one of the biggest success stories in AI-powered drug discovery, before they co-founded Noetik. Their experience and success at Recursion made it clear to us that Noetik would be another emerging leader in using AI to accelerate improve­ments in human health.

We congrat­u­late Ron, Jacob, and the Noetik team and eagerly anticipate their progress in revo­lu­tion­izing cancer drug development. Their success will enable the discovery and development of trans­for­ma­tive new precision cancer medicines that improve patient outcomes.

James Hardiman is a General Partner at DCVC.