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.

In inglese

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