Boston-based Somite, which is working toward the goal of creating any type of human cell to address varied diseases, has closed a $47 million Series A round led by Khosla Ventures. Other venture firms that joined the round included SciFi VC, the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, Fusion Fund, Ajinomoto Group Ventures, Waltham, Mass.-based Pitango HealthTech, TechAviv and Harpoon Ventures, and angels such as Dr. R. Martin Chavez, former chairman of Recursion, and Fidji Simo, the outgoing CEO of Instacart and incoming CEO of Applications at OpenAI.

The company plans to use the funding to accelerate the development of DeltaStem, its foundation model to produce any cell type for any person, and potentially replace any diseased or damaged tissue in the body — a form of reverse engineering of stem cell biology using artificial intelligence. Somite’s key therapeutic programs expect to address conditions such as type 1 diabetes, articular cartilage for orthopedic applications, satellite cells for muscular diseases, and hematopoietic cells for blood disorders.

Somite, named after the embryonic structures at the origin of the musculoskeletal system, says its proprietary capsule technology can generate data at an unprecedented scale — 1,000 times more efficiently than current state-of-the-art methods, overcoming one of the biggest obstacles to development in this area. It then uses the data to train DeltaStem, and discover new cell differentiation protocols that can be further optimized for purity, functionality and scalability. Somite’s approach does not just make the development of cell therapies faster and cheaper, the company says, but also enables entirely new therapeutic possibilities by reliably producing cell types previously beyond reach, enabling varied therapies.

“This funding represents what we believe will lead to an AlphaFold moment for developmental biology, where advancements in AI transform our understanding of cell differentiation from a costly guessing game into a compute-bound engineering discipline,” the company said, alluding to the scientific breakthrough by DeepMind, a unit of Alphabet. DeepMind’s founders Dennis Hassabis and John Jumper won the Novel Prize in chemistry for developing AlphaFold, an AI program that predicts protein structure.

Somite was founded by the duo of Dr. Micha Breakstone, whose previous company Chorus.ai was acquired for $575 million, and Dr. Jonathan Rosenfeld, leader of the Fundamental AI Group at MIT, along with several scientific co-founders. The scientific co-founders include Prof. Olivier Pourquié, member of the National Academies of Science and Medicine, Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School; Prof. Allon Klein, James Prize recipient, Harvard Medical School; Prof. Jay Shendure, member of the National Academy of Sciences, University of Washington; and Prof. Cliff Tabin, Chair of Genetics at Harvard Medical School, member of the National Academy of Sciences.

“We’re building the foundation model for the human cell,” said Breakstone, who serves as Somite’s CEO. “By generating the world’s largest cell signaling dataset at 1000x the efficiency of current methods, we’re training DeltaStem to deliver protocols with unmatched purity, scalability, and reliability.”

“Today, we only know how to reliably produce about 10 types of cells, but there are over 5,000 types of cells in the human cell atlas,” Breakstone told Forbes. “There are more possible ways of creating a specific cell than there are atoms in the universe.”

Khosla Ventures founder Vinod Khosla expressed the belief that Somite AI’s foundation models, “once fully developed and validated, will not only create value for their own pipeline, but have the potential to reshape the entire field of human cell therapy.”

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