Paris startup Rivercell raises $25M seed led by HV Capital to build an AI virtual cell model

HCVC, Alven and Bpifrance Digital Venture joined the round, along with angel investors from Twist Bioscience, DNA Script and Agilent. The company gave no valuation and no date for its first model. Co-founder and CEO Yann Fleureau previously co-founded Cardiologs, which Philips bought in 2021. Chief scientific officer Eric Durand led oncology data science at Novartis, ran data science at Owkin and co-founded Bioptimus. Rivercell argues that no public dataset shows how cells change over time after a drug, so it will produce its own. It will image live cells through each experiment, then read their gene activity, and let the model pick the next experiment. It is also building its own lab instruments. Other companies building cell models include London's Relation, which works with GSK. In AI drug discovery, Chai Discovery and ByteDance's Anew Labs both raised large rounds this year. For founders in AI for biology, the round shows where investors see the defensible edge: proprietary, closed-loop experimental data rather than model architecture alone.