British life sciences startup Kiin Bio has secured an oversubscribed £1.6m pre-seed investment round to launch their Virtual Scientist Platform for drug discovery, KiinOS – with a later launch of a community edition for researchers scheduled for later this year.
The funding round was led by b2venture with participation from Heartfelt, rule30, and several strategic angel investors. With the fresh capital, Kiin Bio will grow its client base, enhance its AI capabilities, and scale its team.
Founded in 2024, Kiin Bio is building an AI-native Virtual Scientist Platform for drug discovery. Its unified platform integrates virtual scientists, an agentic marketplace, and scalable infrastructure to streamline everything from literature review and bioinformatics through to wet-lab execution. Backed by investors and active pilots through its Frontier Programme, Kiin Bio aims to unify the drug discovery process with an AI-driven platform designed to accelerate research and unlock faster, smarter innovation.
The team includes expertise in AI, bioinformatics, cloud infrastructure, and drug discovery:
Kiin Bio looks to tackle one of the biggest challenges in drug discovery: the costly and fragmented R&D process that can reportedly take up to 3.7 million hours across hundreds of scientists to bring a single drug to market.
According to data provided by Kiin Bio, the drug discovery GenAI market is set to generate up to £81.8m in the coming years. While individual technologies exist to support researchers across thousands of daily tasks, Kiin Bio believes there is no unified framework connecting them, resulting in missed productivity gains.
The startup looks to close this gap by building an integrated platform that streamlines the entire process from discovery to development.
Already in motion through the Frontier Programme, Kiin Bio has initiated three pilot projects, secured three commercial partnerships and won a European grant from the ELSA Industry Awards for its AI innovation.
