Rivercell Launches With $25 Million to Build Data Platforms and AI Models That Predict How Human Cells Respond to Treatment

Rivercell, building the AI virtual cell to decipher biology and disease, led by Yann Fleureau and Éric Durand, has announced a $25 million seed round led by HV. HCVC, Alven, and Bpifrance Digital Venture also participated in the round, which will fund the scale-up of Rivercell’s proprietary data generation platform, the expansion of its wet lab in Paris (a lab working with chemicals and biological samples), and the launch of its AI Virtual Cell program.

As an indication-agnostic platform, Rivercell’s world model enables groundbreaking discoveries across a wide range of disease-related cellular behaviors by learning the underlying rules governing how human cells respond to drugs and genetic changes, rather than focusing on features specific to a single disease.

Founded in 2025 by Yann Fleureau, the entrepreneur behind AI company Cardiologs, Rivercell develops an AI Virtual Cell (AIVC) model designed to predict how human cells respond to drugs and genetic changes in silico, reducing reliance on physical laboratory experiments. Eric Durand, former C-level executive at AI drug discovery unicorn Owkin, joined as CSO in 2026.

Rivercell is building a proprietary platform to generate the large-scale, multimodal biological datasets required to train its model. Unlike AlphaFold, which benefited from decades of protein structure data, modeling cellular behavior requires vast amounts of time-resolved data capturing cellular responses to different perturbations. By developing purpose-built data-generation infrastructure, Rivercell aims to accelerate drug discovery and transform pharmaceutical R&D.

“A world model of the cell is the opportunity of the century in medicine. The missing piece is data: how cells change over time and under treatment, seen through multiple lenses and at multiple layers, captured at scale. Building that data engine in Europe is strategic, not only for Rivercell but for the continent's place in AI and biology," said Yann Fleureau, co-founder and CEO of Rivercell.

Yann Fleureau previously co-founded and led AI diagnostics company Cardiologs, which was acquired by Philips in a nine-figure deal in 2021. Eric Durand, a data scientist, formerly led oncology data science at Novartis and served as Chief Data Science Officer at Owkin before co-founding Bioptimus, a bio foundation model company that raised $76 million.

“AI is already rewriting how we understand the chemistry of life, from protein structure to molecular design. The next frontier is predicting how cells behave, and that requires a full-stack approach that combines a novel platform, automated wet labs, and world models. Yann and Eric bring exactly this combination of expertise, and with its footing in both Paris's AI ecosystem and Basel's pharma cluster, Rivercell is uniquely positioned to lead it,” said Maxi Pethö-Schramm, Principal at HV.

Rivercell’s scientific advisors include Dr. Charlotte Bunne and Prof. Dr. Dr. Fabian Theis, alongside angel investors comprising founders and executives from Twist Bioscience, DNA Script, Agilent, and Abivax/Ipsen.

“AI virtual cells will transform how we understand and engineer biology. Rivercell’s ambition to unite large-scale perturbation experiments with AI simulation is why I’m excited to join its Scientific Advisory Board,” said Dr. Charlotte Bunne, Assistant Professor, Artificial Intelligence in Molecular Medicine at EPFL.

"Understanding how cells respond to perturbations, over time rather than in snapshots, is one of the big open problems in biology. Rivercell is tackling it at scale, with both the data and the AI models to match. I'm thrilled to join its Scientific Advisory Board," closed Prof. Fabian Theis, Director of the Computational Health Center at Helmholtz Munich, Scientific Director of Helmholtz AI and Professor of Mathematical Modeling of Biological Systems at the Technical University of Munich.