Living Models is a Paris- and Berkeley-based company developing AI foundation models for biological data, beginning with plant biology. Its flagship BOTANIC technology is a family of transformer models trained on genomic sequences from 43 plant species, with up to one billion parameters. Despite being trained on just eight NVIDIA H100 GPUs, BOTANIC reportedly matches state-of-the-art genomic models across 22 benchmark tasks, demonstrating efficient scaling. The company aims to meaningfully shorten crop breeding timelines and expand access to genomic selection beyond the largest seed companies, with a longer-term vision of foundation models that learn the language of living systems. Living Models emerged from stealth in 2026 with a $7M seed round co-led by Asterion Ventures and The Galion Project, joined by Kima Ventures, STATION F, and UC Berkeley.
Living Models
ActiveAI foundation models for biology, starting with plant genomics
Total raised
$7M
1 round
Stage
Seed
Team
1-10
since 2024
Pricing
Freemium
free plan
Founded
2024
Paris, France
Agent-ready
—
BOTANIC plant-genomics foundation models
Transformer models up to 1B parameters
Trained on 43 plant species genomes
Compute-efficient training
Genomic selection for crop breeding
Benchmark-competitive performance
Foundation models for living systems
Open scientific benchmarking
10/100
Early
MCP server
Public API
Webhooks
OAuth 2.0
SDKs
No public agent surfaces detected yet.
— Seed $7M incl. Asterion Ventures +4
Capital network
$7M raised ·5 backers·9 network links
- Backers5
- Shared portfoliocompanies these backers also fund
- Extended networkfunds that co-invest alongside them
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- What is BOTANIC?
- Living Models' family of transformer foundation models trained on genomic sequences from 43 plant species.
- How much did Living Models raise?
- A $7M seed round in 2026 co-led by Asterion Ventures and The Galion Project.
- Where is Living Models based?
- Paris, France and Berkeley, California.
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