HEUKING advises apheris AI GmbH on its Series A Financing Round

A team led by Ariane Neubauer, Partner at HEUKING’s Berlin office, advised apheris AI GmbH (Apheris) on its Series A financing round with a volume of 8.25 million US dollars.

The Series A financing round is led by OTB Ventures and eCAPITAL. Supported by existing investors such as Octopus Ventures and Heal.Capital, the new round brings the total funding to 20.8 million US dollars.

The Berlin-based start-up Apheris enables governed, private, and secure access to data for artificial intelligence (AI), and analytics without moving the data from its original owners. This is particularly important in the life sciences sector, where the protection of sensitive data is of utmost priority.

Robin Röhm and Dr. Michael Höh founded Apheris in 2019. The Apheris Compute Gateway, the software agent that serves as a gateway between local data and AI models, is already being used by the AI Structural Biology (AISB) Consortium, a joint initiative that sees members such as AbbVie, Boehringer Ingelheim, Johnson & Johnson, and Sanofi collaborate on AI-driven drug discovery.

The new funding will allow Apheris to host leading foundational models surpassing the state-of-the art model performance based on unprecedented access to more training data, which is currently locked down in private data repositories. Other critical focuses post-fundraise are the expansion of the Apheris data network, and cementing its position as the most secure solution in the life sciences industry.

Counsel to Apheris
HEUKING:
Ariane Neubauer (Lead; Venture Capital), Berlin,
Dr. Eva Kettner (Employment), Hamburg,
Dr. Henrik Lay (Tax), Hamburg,
Shimon Merkel, LL.M. (Venture Capital), Berlin,
Mark Rossbroich, LL.M. (Venture Capital), Cologne