companies

InstaDeep

Tunisia-born, London-based AI lab now part of BioNTech, building decision-making and drug-discovery AI including open protein and DNA foundation models.

InstaDeep was founded in Tunis in 2014 by Karim Beguir and Zohra Slim, reportedly starting with two laptops and about $2,000, and grew by self-funding with client revenue rather than early venture capital. The company built its name in enterprise 'decision-making AI' — reinforcement learning and optimization systems for logistics, supply chains and industrial planning — while also publishing research-grade work in game-playing AI and, increasingly, computational biology. A multi-year AI research partnership with BioNTech, begun in 2019 to accelerate immunotherapy design and later credited with an early-warning system for high-risk SARS-CoV-2 variants, deepened into a full acquisition: BioNTech completed its purchase of InstaDeep for roughly $682 million in 2023, the largest tech acquisition to date involving an African-founded startup. Since the acquisition, InstaDeep has continued operating under its own name from London, with roughly 450 staff spread across Europe, Africa and North America. Its current public-facing flagship is DeepChain, a platform for genomics and protein-design foundation models — including the openly released Nucleotide Transformer and generative protein models ProtBFN and AbBFN — aimed at pharma and biotech teams doing drug discovery and diagnostics R&D.

Founded

2014

Headquarters

London, United Kingdom

Sector

lab