OneThree Biotech gives away COVID-19 toxicity screening to prove its AI platform

OneThree Biotech runs an AI platform that helps drug developers identify promising treatment targets and flag toxic side effects early, before costly clinical trials.

Giving away free AI toxicity screening for COVID-19 drug candidates builds trust and partnerships for a young platform faster than charging for it would.

$2.5M seed round led by Primary Venture Partners and Meridian Street Capital.

Neel Madhukar co-founded OneThree Biotech in 2018 as a graduate of Cornell Tech's Runway Startup program, building a New York-based AI platform meant to speed up drug development by flagging promising and risky drug targets earlier, before expensive clinical trials rule them out.

OneThree had already worked with cancer-drug developer Oncoceutics, where its AI flagged a cancer type not previously on researchers' radar as a strong treatment candidate. As COVID-19 research accelerated in early 2020, the company began offering free AI toxicity screening on potential COVID-19 treatments, and on 2020-03-26 closed a $2.5M seed round led by Primary Venture Partners and Meridian Street Capital to build out its back-end infrastructure and pursue more biotech and pharma partnerships.

A prior result with Oncoceutics gave OneThree a concrete case to point to before asking anyone to trust an unproven AI platform.

COVID-19 research created an urgent, high-visibility problem where free toxicity screening could prove the platform's value publicly.

The company was only two years old and needed partnerships more than it needed early revenue.

Seed investors backed the free-offer strategy by funding infrastructure to support it rather than requiring immediate monetization.

Giving away your product for free during a crisis can be the fastest way for an unproven AI platform to earn real partnerships.

As of 2020-03-26, OneThree had raised a $2.5M seed round, was offering free toxicity screening on COVID-19 drug candidates, and was building out infrastructure to support more biotech and pharma partnerships; no results from the COVID-19 screening effort had been reported yet.