100 Disruptive Brands 2017

Disruptive Brands

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2017

Benevolent AI

Benevolent AI develops and applies artificial intelligence to enhance and accelerate scientific innovation. Life science papers are published every 30 seconds, there are 10,000 updates on science search engine PubMed a day and 90% of the world’s data was created in the past two years.

“It is impossible for humans alone to process all this information to advance scientific research. Benevolent AI is developing and applying artificial intelligence to probe science’s hidden knowledge,” says founder Ken Mulvany.

The startup was founded in 2013 following the sale of Proximagen, a biotech firm that Mulvany founded and sold to a major US pharma company for $555m (£431m). His experience at Proximagen highlighted the challenges of innovating using a process of scientific discovery that had not changed for 50 years.

Benevolent AI has raised $87m (£67.5m) from blue-chip institutional investors and pharmaceutical companies including Woodford Investment Management and Lansdowne Partners. Its current valuation is $1.7bn (£1.3bn). The company announced a major partnership with Johnson & Johnson in November 2016.