Causaly Announces $5M Series A Funding to Advance Biomedical Knowledge Visualization Platform

VCBeat (WeChat ID: vcbeat) learned from foreign media that on November 19, 2019, local time, Causaly, a machine reading company specializing in natural language processing, announced the completion of a $5 million Series A financing round. The round was jointly invested by Marathon Venture Capital, Pentech Ventures, and EBRD Venture Capital.

Causaly, founded in 2017 and specializing in biomedical natural language processing, is developing a machine reading platform that converts free-flowing text into causal knowledge graphs and applies machine learning techniques to discover new knowledge.

In fact, in addition to the more than 30 million articles already published, 100,000 new biomedical articles are awaiting publication each month—making it inefficient to manually identify relevant correlations and easy to miss emerging discoveries. Causaly’s natural language processing platform operates like a human reader: for all biomedical articles it has processed, the platform can visualize their relevant correlations within seconds. This enables users to rapidly identify the relevance of research articles, a task that previously could take weeks or even months to complete through traditional literature reviews.

Causaly collaborates with multiple pharmaceutical companies, biotechnology firms, hospitals, and academic institutions, including Novartis. Its natural language processing system can be used for R&D and commercial support, enabling faster, higher-quality, and more transparent data-driven decisions in areas such as drug discovery, drug safety, clinical trials, epidemiology, and HEOR.

Yiannis Kiachopoulos, Co-founder and CEO of Causaly, explained: “Our goal is to help researchers, physicians, and decision-makers uncover critical insights hidden within millions of biomedical publications. We believe that Causaly can transform the way people read and interpret knowledge through visualization, thereby helping to address the most intractable systemic challenges in human health.”

Artur Saudabayev, Co-founder and Chief Technology Officer of Causaly, added, “We have assembled a world-class team of engineers tasked with tackling some of the unresolved challenges in natural language processing, including the goal of matching or even surpassing human-level performance in understanding causal relationships in language. This investment will help us further advance technology development, customer operations, and team expansion.”

Marc Moens, a partner at Pentech, stated, “We believe that Causaly is developing a unique product capable of interpreting an unprecedented volume of complex information and enhancing efficiency, thereby creating substantial value in the biomedical field and beyond. We are highly excited about their growth potential.”

Marathon Venture Capital is an early-stage venture capital fund that focuses on investing in seed-round market leaders (typically acquiring a 15–20% equity stake for €500,000 to €1 million) and evaluates investment value based on follow-on commitments from lead investors. Marathon’s portfolio companies include Bugsense, Taxibeat, Workable, and Resin.io.

Pentech Ventures is a venture capital fund that makes initial investments ranging from £500,000 to £2 million, with total investment per company capped at £10 million over the entire lifecycle of the investment.

EBRD Venture Capital, established in 1991, is the largest single investor in countries spanning Central Europe to Central Asia. In addition to its own financing, it has mobilized substantial foreign direct investment. It provides project financing to banks, industrial sectors, and enterprises, including new venture capital investments and investments in existing companies.

(Compiled by Xiong Hui)