Toronto's Biossil Hits Unicorn Status via OpenAI-Led Round
AI-generated image · Bay Street Wire
The biotech startup raised $153 million USD to resurrect failed drug projects using AI, signaling a growing trend of AI giants entering the pharmaceutical space.
Toronto-based Biossil has reached a $1 billion USD valuation following a $153 million USD ($216 million CAD) financing round, as BetaKit first reported.
The OpenAI Startup Fund led the all-equity round, a detail confirmed to BetaKit by Biossil co-founder and CEO Anthony Mouchantaf. Other participants included Founders Fund, Quiet Capital, Modern Capital, Golden Ventures, Panache Ventures, the Abu Dhabi Investment Council, and Duke University’s endowment fund.
Biossil operates by using an AI platform to identify drug candidates that failed their original clinical trials. The company then buys or licenses these molecules, bypassing the traditional pharmaceutical development starting point. The startup is currently targeting treatments for Alzheimer’s disease, glioblastoma, breast cancer, idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis, and sickle cell disease.
Mouchantaf stated via LinkedIn that the company is building infrastructure across Canada and the United States to integrate AI and medicine from discovery through to the clinic, asserting that AI-driven biomedical insights must be translated into the physical world to help patients. Biossil intends to use the new capital to acquire more drug candidates and expand its clinical development capacity.
This move reflects a broader trend of AI firms targeting healthcare. BetaKit notes that Anthropic has established a biolab in California, and the Canadian AI developer Cohere acquired the biopharmaceutical data processing startup Reliant AI in May to accelerate its healthcare efforts.