Noetik, based in San Francisco, is an AI-native biotechnology company applying self-supervised machine learning and high-throughput spatial biology to develop next-generation cancer therapeutics. The company was co-founded by CEO Ron Alfa, M.D., Ph.D., and CSO Jacob Rinaldi, Ph.D., on the premise that the biggest bottleneck in oncology drug discovery is not model architecture but the availability of large, consistent, multimodal biological data, which Noetik generates itself.
Noetik's core platform is OCTO, the Oncology Counterfactual Therapeutics Oracle, a massively multimodal, transformer-based foundation model trained on data from thousands of patient tumors produced in the company's own wet lab specifically for self-supervised learning. Building on this, Noetik introduced OCTO-VirtualCell (OCTO-vc), a virtual-cell foundation model that can infer the behavior of cells and cell systems in the context of health and disease. OCTO-vc was trained on nearly 40 million cells across many cancer indications, which the company describes as among the largest spatial-transcriptomics datasets assembled, alongside a complementary model called Celleporter. By learning a predictive, counterfactual model of tumor biology, Noetik aims to identify new drug targets and design therapies, especially for cancer immunotherapy, with greater confidence than conventional approaches.
Noetik closed an oversubscribed $40 million Series A led by Polaris Partners, with managing partner Amy Schulman joining the board, and participation from new investors Khosla Ventures, Wittington Ventures and Breakout Ventures, plus existing backers including DCVC, Zetta Venture Partners, Catalio Capital Management, 11.2 Capital, Epic Ventures, Intermountain Ventures and North South Ventures. The company has also signed a major partnership with GSK, which licensed Noetik's OCTO virtual-cell foundation models with upfront and near-term payments to transform its cancer therapeutics R&D.
Noetik sits within the fast-emerging 'virtual cell' and spatial-biology foundation-model movement, distinguished by its strategy of vertically integrating wet-lab data generation with large multimodal models. By owning the data pipeline that fuels its models, Noetik positions itself to build a compounding advantage in modeling tumor biology and discovering precision oncology medicines.