Hello Sifted reader,

The world is still losing its shit over each successive OpenAI release.

But let’s take a minute and get excited about some other AI news. AI biotech unicorn Owkin said on Friday that it was leading a new €33m consortium — backed by the French government — to improve cancer diagnosis and better tailor treatments to individuals.

While Europe is, undoubtedly, lagging in the generative AI race, it’s performed incredibly well when it comes to innovations in AI-driven medicine.

In 2020, Oxford’s Exscientia brought an AI-discovered drug molecule to human clinical trials for the first time ever (though the study eventually failed). In 2021, London’s DeepMind spun out a unit, Isomorphic Labs, to work on AI drug discovery using protein-folding AI model AlphaFold. And in 2023, European AI drug discovery startups continue to attract funding.

Still, OpenAI’s recent progress makes AI drug development seem frustratingly slow. The latest GPT-4 Technical Report shows how that model could be used in pharma, either to look for existing patents or look for compounds with similar properties to a certain medicine.

No doubt that these kinds of models will be applied more and more as one tool in the arsenal of AI drug discovery companies — despite how terrible they are at science (hello, made up academic papers!)

But wouldn’t it be great if AI medicine developed at the same speed and attracted the same hype that we see around large language models like GPT-4? And wouldn’t it be great if new large language models had the same guardrails — the equivalent of clinical trials — that are required in medicine? Each have something to learn from the other.

— Eleanor Warnock, deputy editor

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🦣 Court battle brews over famed woolly mammoth meatball. Australian cultured meat startup Vox claimed a world-first (and grabbed plenty of headlines) last week when it revealed its mammoth meatball. But Belgian startup Paleo is threatening legal action, claiming it got there first with mammoth myoglobin.

🌳 This exited founder is plugging more than €45m into climate tech. Here’s what he’s interested in backing.

Bar chart showing the average equity percentage taken in spinouts by the University of Cambridge, the University of Oxford, UCL and Imperial College London

Oxford University has a pretty bad reputation for its policies on spinning out companies, and its founders have the lowest satisfaction rates in Europe, according to a 2022 survey of spinouts.

Critics say it takes too much equity from researchers who launch companies, and that puts a blocker on late-stage successes.

But is it really the worst offender in town?

💰 On sale for 40%: Stakes in European VC funds. Exits are scarce and the value of portfolios are dipping... so some LPs are cashing in.

👉 Startups in Europe have laid off more than 40k people since March last year — five of them tell their stories to Sifted.

🥊 The Sifted Podcast. This week on the pod, Tim digs further into his chat with Conjecture founder Connor Leahy, who thinks AI will leave us "super, super fucked".

🤔 How to spend pre-seed funding?

🤑 How to spend seed funding?

💸 How to spend Series A funding?

💰 Series A+

Spanish meeting planner software startup Troop has raised an $11m Series B.
Li.Fi, a German decentralised finance infrastructure platform, has raised a $17.5m Series A.

💰 Pre-seed & seed

Translucent, a London-based accounting platform, has raised £2.7m in pre-seed funding from LocalGlobe.

💰 Undisclosed

Aurealis Therapeutics, a Swiss-Nordic biotech developing gene therapies, has raised $10m.
Ireland's Bluedrop Medical, a medtech that uses AI to monitor changes in the feet of diabetes patients, has raised €10.5m.
APlanet, a Spanish ESG platform for businesses, has raised €4m.

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