InstaDeep

InstaDeep is a London-based artificial intelligence company, founded in Tunis in 2014 by Karim Beguir and Zohra Slim, and since July 2023 a wholly owned subsidiary of the German immunotherapy company BioNTech (Nasdaq: BNTX). It appears here as an AI vendor, not an adopter: it builds decision-making systems on deep learning and reinforcement learning, and it still sells them outside its parent. Its products are DeepChain, a biology AI platform for genomics and protein and antibody design; DeepPCB, which routes printed circuit boards; DeepPack, for logistics and packing; and AIchor, a platform for running machine learning experiments. Only DeepPCB is open to anyone, with self-serve sign-up and pay-as-you-go pricing. The others are reached through the company's own team.

Its defining pattern is the captive lab with outside customers. InstaDeep raised 100 million dollars in a Series B round in January 2022, led by Alpha Intelligence Capital with BioNTech and Google among the investors. By then it had already built an early warning system with BioNTech that, the company said, detected the Omicron variant on the day its sequence became available. BioNTech announced the acquisition in January 2023, for about 362 million pounds upfront in cash and BioNTech shares plus up to about 200 million pounds in milestone payments, and completed it in July 2023. Both companies stated that InstaDeep would keep serving clients in technology, transport and logistics, industrial and financial services.

Inside BioNTech, the work is drug discovery. At BioNTech's AI Day in October 2025, InstaDeep described Kyber, an in-house supercomputer of about 500 petaflops built on NVIDIA graphics processing units, alongside models for antibody design and for reading protein fragments from lab instruments. In February 2026 it released the third generation of its genomics model, the Nucleotide Transformer, in sizes from 8 million to 650 million parameters, reading up to a million DNA letters at once and trained on 24 species. The weights can be downloaded, but not freely: the original Nucleotide Transformer repository carries a non-commercial Creative Commons license, and the new checkpoints sit behind a gated custom license.

The outside business continues on a smaller scale. In March 2026 InstaDeep signed a long-term development partnership with the German water technology group Wilo to build a scalable AI platform for water management, starting with a pilot in critical infrastructure. DeepPCB is the clearest example of a product anyone can try: engineers upload a placed board from tools such as Altium or KiCad, route the critical connections themselves, and a reinforcement learning engine routes the rest to their design rules.

The honest framing: InstaDeep's value to its owner rests on whether its models shorten BioNTech's path to new cancer and infectious disease medicines, and that is still an intention rather than a measured result. The published figures are benchmarks and laboratory numbers, not approved drugs. The research is real and peer-reviewed, and the outside products are genuine machine learning rather than rebadged software, but they are a side business next to the parent's pipeline. Among catalog peers it sits closest to Isomorphic Labs, a drug discovery lab owned by a larger parent, yet unlike Isomorphic it still sells tools to engineers who have nothing to do with medicine. Chai Discovery and Owkin, by contrast, work with many drug companies rather than chiefly for one.