Inceptive

Inceptive is a Palo Alto, California-based biotechnology company that uses AI to design unique mRNA sequences that can be rapidly created and tested in the lab. mRNA can be thought of as “biological software” designed to encode executable instructions within human cells. Molecules that prove successful in the lab are licensed to pharmaceutical partners for clinical development.

Inceptive was founded in 2021 by Jakob Uszkoreit, formerly a Google AI researcher who worked on Google DeepMind's AlphaFold. Inceptive builds on generative AI technology pioneered by Uszkoreit and his colleagues. Uszkoreit is credited with the idea of focusing on attention, which was the basis for a publication on transformer models and laid the foundation for subsequent AI technology. Inceptive applies similar techniques to generate biological data instead of text or images.

Inceptive partnered with a major European pharmaceutical company to develop a new mRNA vaccine against infectious disease.

Funding from NVIDIA allowed Inceptive to have access to its computing platforms and chips.