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Owkin

Company Overview

A Paris-founded agentic AI company that has secured K Pro platform licenses with Sanofi, AstraZeneca and Boehringer Ingelheim in 2026, while running a Phase Ia/Ib oncology trial for its own drug pipeline. Owkin operates across three interlocking lines: the K Pro AI Scientist platform sold to pharmaceutical companies, the MOSAIC multimodal patient data network that underpins it, and a small clinical-stage oncology program. The company describes its ambition as building toward what it calls Biological Artificial SuperIntelligence, defined as true autonomy and causal understanding of disease. With more than 200 staff and three named affiliate companies, Owkin has deliberately separated diagnostics and foundation-model work into distinct entities, keeping the parent focused on enterprise AI and drug development.

Headquarters and Global Presence

Owkin is headquartered in Paris and maintains offices in New York, Boston, London, Nantes, Geneva and Berlin. Its Paris laboratory operates from BioLab Campus Broussais. The company is privately held and not listed on any stock exchange.

Founding and History

Thomas Clozel, a clinical research doctor and former assistant professor in clinical hematology, and Gilles Wainrib, a machine learning academic, co-founded Owkin in Paris on August 3, 2016. Owkin became France's newest unicorn in November 2021 when Sanofi made a $180 million equity investment valuing the company above $1 billion. Cumulative funding stands above $308 million across multiple rounds, with investors including Google Ventures, Otium Capital and MACSF. Two businesses have since been separated out: Bioptimus, incubated internally and launched in February 2024 to build biology foundation models, and Waiv, the diagnostics unit spun out in March 2026.

Therapy Areas and Focus

Owkin's platform work spans oncology and immunology, the two areas covered by its K Pro licenses and its MOSAIC patient dataset. Its internal drug pipeline is focused exclusively on oncology, targeting the immunosuppressive tumor microenvironment. The clinical unmet need is the subset of solid tumor patients who do not respond to checkpoint inhibitor monotherapy, where modulating the prostanoid pathway is the mechanistic rationale.

Technology Platforms and Modalities

K Pro is an agentic AI platform that autonomously orchestrates a suite of AI skills and tools to support hypothesis generation, testing and prioritization across biopharma research and development. Pharmaceutical users access and analyze multimodal patient data through a single environment that produces reproducible analyses. The free academic entry point, K Navigator, was launched on May 6, 2025; K Pro is the enterprise-grade tier licensed to Sanofi, AstraZeneca and Boehringer Ingelheim.

MOSAIC, the Multi-Omics Spatial Atlas in Cancer, is the proprietary data asset behind K Pro's oncology use cases. It currently covers 2,725 patients across 11 therapy areas, integrating spatial transcriptomics, single-cell RNA sequencing, bulk RNA sequencing, whole exome sequencing, digitized hematoxylin and eosin histology, and clinical data. Owkin is expanding MOSAIC toward 7,000 patients across seven cancer indications.

Key Pipeline and Programs

OKN4395 is Owkin's lead and only disclosed clinical drug candidate. It is a first-in-class selective inhibitor of the EP2, EP4 and DP1 prostanoid receptors, targeting immunosuppressive signaling in the tumor microenvironment of advanced solid tumors. Owkin in-licensed the asset from Idorsia and unveiled the oncology and immunology pipeline in May 2024.

The INVOKE trial, registered as NCT06789172, is a global, multicenter, Phase Ia/Ib, first-in-human, open-label study sponsored by Epkin, an affiliate of Owkin France. The first patient was dosed on January 22, 2025. Phase Ia evaluates safety and tolerability through dose escalation as monotherapy and in combination with pembrolizumab. Phase Ib adds four expansion cohorts to generate preliminary anti-tumor activity data.

OKN4395 was the first Owkin program to run on K1.0, the company's AI-powered operating system, applied from asset selection through clinical development optimization. The drug pipeline is small and deliberately so: Owkin's stated model is to use AI to select and advance a narrow set of high-conviction assets rather than build a broad discovery portfolio.

Recent Developments

September 2, 2026: Owkin signed a K Pro license with Boehringer Ingelheim covering existing multimodal oncology data and new immunology data to be generated, following a 2025 pilot in which Owkin delivered spatial tumor microenvironment insights using MOSAIC. June 5, 2026: the Sanofi relationship was expanded into a multi-year collaboration to co-develop biopharma AI agents, underpinned by a five-year K Pro license, building on the original 90 million euro oncology partnership from 2021. May 2026: a three-year K Pro license was announced with AstraZeneca, focused on competitive intelligence and decision-support workflows. The three enterprise licenses secured within four months mark a meaningful step toward a recurring software revenue model alongside the drug pipeline.

Key Personnel

Thomas Clozel, MD, serves as co-founder and Chief Executive Officer. An oncologist and former assistant professor in clinical hematology, he has led Owkin since its founding and represents the company publicly in all major commercial announcements.

Gilles Wainrib, PhD, serves as co-founder. A professor of machine learning, he brings the academic AI foundation on which Owkin's platform research is built.

Miriam Merad, MD, PhD, of the Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York chairs Owkin's scientific advisory board.

Strategic Partnerships

Sanofi is Owkin's longest-standing and largest commercial partner, with the relationship now structured as a five-year K Pro license and a multi-year co-development collaboration for bespoke biopharma AI agents, expanded on June 5, 2026. Sanofi's original $180 million equity investment in 2021 accompanied a 90 million euro strategic collaboration on oncology target identification and patient subgrouping.

AstraZeneca signed a three-year K Pro license in May 2026 covering competitive intelligence and decision-support use cases. Boehringer Ingelheim followed in September 2026 with a license combining K Pro access and both existing oncology data and newly generated immunology data from MOSAIC. Together, the three deals establish K Pro as a platform with validated demand from top-ten global pharmaceutical companies.

FAQ Section

Owkin sells K Pro as an enterprise software license to pharmaceutical companies, pairing it with access to MOSAIC multimodal patient data that makes the AI agent genuinely useful for oncology and immunology research. That commercial model is separate from, but complementary to, its own drug program: OKN4395 in Phase Ia/Ib serves as proof that Owkin's AI-driven asset selection and clinical optimization can be applied internally, not only sold to partners. The diagnostics and foundation-model businesses have been spun into independent entities, Waiv and Bioptimus respectively, leaving the parent company with a cleaner three-line structure.

MOSAIC integrates six data modalities for each patient, including spatial transcriptomics and single-cell RNA sequencing alongside conventional genomics and clinical data, giving researchers a three-dimensional view of the tumor microenvironment that single-modality datasets cannot provide. At 2,725 patients across 11 therapy areas, and expanding toward 7,000 patients across seven cancer indications, the scale is also commercially significant. The Boehringer Ingelheim pilot in 2025 demonstrated a concrete output: spatial insights into the tumor microenvironment of a specific gene target, the kind of hypothesis-generating result that justifies an enterprise license.

K Navigator, launched May 6, 2025, is a free agentic co-pilot for academic researchers, designed as an exploratory environment for hypothesis generation and validation. K Pro is the enterprise version, carrying a broader suite of AI agents built for pharmaceutical challenges spanning data exploration, drug discovery and clinical development, and deployed within a customer's own governance and security infrastructure. All three current commercial licensees, Sanofi, AstraZeneca and Boehringer Ingelheim, have licensed K Pro rather than K Navigator.

OKN4395 is a first-in-class selective inhibitor of three prostanoid receptors, EP2, EP4 and DP1, targeting immunosuppressive signaling within the tumor microenvironment rather than blocking the PD-1 or PD-L1 checkpoint axis directly. The prostanoid pathway contributes to immune evasion in solid tumors independently of PD-1 status, which is part of the rationale for combining OKN4395 with pembrolizumab in Phase Ib of the INVOKE trial. Owkin in-licensed the asset from Idorsia and it was selected and advanced using the company's own K1.0 AI operating system.

Oncology and immunology are the two areas addressed across both the software and drug businesses. Oncology is the more mature side: MOSAIC covers 11 cancer therapy areas, OKN4395 targets advanced solid tumors, and the early Sanofi collaboration focused on oncology target identification. Immunology was added to the MOSAIC data generation scope as part of the Boehringer Ingelheim license, reflecting where large pharma partners are directing discovery investment. The logic is that the tumor microenvironment is fundamentally an immunology problem, so the two areas overlap mechanistically as well as commercially.

On the software side, Owkin is at a commercial inflection point, having signed three enterprise K Pro licenses in the space of four months in 2026 and expanded the Sanofi relationship to a five-year term. On the drug side, OKN4395 is in Phase Ia dose escalation under the INVOKE trial (NCT06789172), with Phase Ia safety and tolerability data as the nearest clinical readout. The company is also scaling MOSAIC toward 7,000 patients, which will strengthen the data asset supporting future K Pro deals. Owkin remains privately held with no announced plans to list.

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