Gradient Ventures Founding Partner Ankit Jain Joins Board of Biomedical AI Startup BenchSci
TORONTO, Jan. 10, 2019 /PRNewswire-PRWeb/ -- BenchSci today announced the appointment of Ankit Jain to its board of directors effective January 1, 2019. Jain joins the board as a founding partner of BenchSci investor Gradient Ventures, Google's AI-focused venture fund.
"We're thrilled to work even more closely with Ankit and the extended Gradient Ventures team as we apply machine learning to increase the velocity of biomedical research," says BenchSci CEO Liran Belenzon. "Ankit and Gradient Ventures have been incredibly supportive of our mission, and we look forward to working even more closely with them as we work hard to fulfill it."
"BenchSci is tackling one of the most significant business problems in life sciences using machine learning. The domain expertise of the team has enabled them to deploy their technology at scale across some of the biggest names in the pharmaceutical world," says Jain. "I'm excited to join BenchSci's board as they look to expand beyond their initial application in antibodies to further accelerate life science discovery."
Jain's appointment comes as BenchSci announces a more than 5x increase in biological experiments understood by its machine learning technology, to 5.2 million from 950,000 one year earlier. These experiments have revealed more than 352 million relationships amongst more than 33 million entities. Available in BenchSci's comprehensive biological knowledge graph, the relationships allow researchers to rapidly find evidence-based insights for faster, more cost-effective, more successful, and higher-impact discoveries.
BenchSci's first product leveraging its knowledge graph, an antibody search engine, helps researchers find reliable antibodies 24x faster and 75% cheaper. It now powers discoveries in 15 of the top 20 pharmaceutical companies and more than 2,000 academic institutions.
ABOUT BENCHSCI
BenchSci accelerates life science discovery by empowering researchers with the world's biomedical knowledge to increase their success bringing new treatments to patients. Built for life scientists by life scientists, BenchSci's AI reads biomedical papers to uncover hidden knowledge in published experiments. BenchSci organizes this knowledge into the world's most comprehensive biological knowledge graph. Unlike with other tools, researchers can then ask BenchSci complex questions and receive evidence-based answers from real-world experiments. The result: faster, more cost-effective, more successful, and higher impact discoveries by BenchSci's academic and industry partners. BenchSci's first product, an antibody search engine, helps researchers find reliable antibodies 24x faster and 75% cheaper. It now powers discoveries in 15 of the top 20 pharmaceutical companies and more than 2,000 academic institutions.
ABOUT GRADIENT VENTURES
Gradient Ventures is Google's AI-focused venture fund - investing in and connecting early stage startups with Google's resources, innovation, and technical leadership in artificial intelligence. The fund focuses on helping founders navigate the challenges in developing AI-based products, from leveraging training datasets to helping companies take advantage of the latest techniques, so that great ideas can come to life. Gradient was founded in 2017 and is based in Palo Alto, California. For more information, visit gradient.com.
ABOUT ANKIT JAIN
Ankit is a Founding Partner at Gradient Ventures and a Director of Engineering at Google. Previously, he was the Vice President of Product at SimilarWeb, which he joined via the acquisition of mobile intelligence startup Quettra, which he founded and led as CEO. Prior to Quettra, Ankit was the Head of Search, Discovery and Infrastructure for Google Play, which he joined through the acquisition of Cuil. At Cuil, he helped build several parts of web, real time and social search engines from scratch. Ankit has co-authored the leading chapter in the book Next Generation Search Engines: Advanced Models for Information Retrieval as well as one of the most defining blog posts about mobile app retention. Ankit received his BS in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from the University of California, Berkeley (Cal) and his MS in Computer Science with a focus on Parallel and Distributed Computing also from Cal. He received a Certificate in Management of Technology from the Walter A. Haas School of Business at Cal.
SOURCE BenchSci
