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LinkedIn’s Reid Hoffman Launches Manas AI, a New Bio Startup


LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman turned 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 growth scientists to deepen their experience and pace up the speed at which new medication are found. The startup goals to unite researchers with superior AI methods to extra shortly determine how probably life-saving medication might work together with the human physique.

Associated: LinkedIn’s Reid Hoffman: To Scale, Do Issues That Do not Scale

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 essentially change how the trade discovers and develops new medicines.

“Most individuals have had mates, relations, and so on., who’ve died from most cancers or had severe most cancers issues,” Hoffman advised CNBC on Monday. “If we are able to make an enormous distinction on this, and that is the sort of factor that AI could make an enormous distinction in, it is the sort of cause why AI might be nice for humanity.”

Reid Hoffman The Halfway SF on December 05, 2023, in San Francisco, California. Photograph by Kimberly White/Getty Pictures for WIRED

The startup has raised $24.6 million in seed funding thus far, with Hoffman main the funding spherical with enterprise capital agency Normal Catalyst. It would function its AI methods in knowledge facilities owned by Microsoft.

Associated: Reid Hoffman: To Efficiently Develop A Enterprise, You Should ‘Count on Chaos’

Mukherjee is a Columbia College professor and writer of “The Emperor of All Maladies,” a guide 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 workers together with Mukherjee and Hoffman, with Hoffman saying he serves as the corporate’s “AI man” and Mukherjee because the “bio man.” Manas’ aim is to unite the 2 fields.

“It is not simply one of the best of science and it is not simply one of the best of AI, as a result of both of these two [is] inadequate,” Hoffman advised CNBC. “It’s essential to put these two collectively.”

The AI healthcare sector noticed substantial investments in 2024. In keeping with PitchBook, buyers poured $10.5 billion into 511 healthcare AI offers in 2024. Most cancers screening AI startup Freenome raised probably the most cash out of the group with a $254 million Sequence F in February 2024.

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