Owkin

Owkin is a privately held artificial intelligence company headquartered in Paris, with an office in New York. It was founded in 2016 by Thomas Clozel, a clinical oncologist, and Gilles Wainrib, a machine-learning researcher. It is an AI vendor: it sells K Pro, an AI agent that answers drug-research questions from multimodal patient data, to pharmaceutical and biotech teams, and it offers a free tier to researchers. It also licenses that patient data, and through an affiliate it runs a cancer drug candidate in an early clinical trial.

Owkin's roots are in federated learning, a way to train one model across several hospitals' data without moving that data, so patient records stay where they are held. The company built an open-source federated learning framework called Substra and contributed to MELLODDY, a European consortium in which drugmakers trained shared models without exposing their compound libraries. That privacy-first pitch drew Sanofi, which in November 2021 made a 180 million dollar equity investment alongside a three-year research collaboration worth 90 million dollars plus milestones, covering four cancers including triple-negative breast cancer and mesothelioma. Owkin says it has raised 304 million dollars in total, from investors including Sanofi, Bristol Myers Squibb, Bpifrance and Google Ventures.

Its current pattern is data-plus-agents: pair a proprietary patient dataset with agents that query it in plain language. In May 2025 Owkin launched a free research co-pilot called K Navigator, and in October 2025 it launched K Pro for industry, built on OwkinZero, its own biological reasoning model. The free tier is now presented as K Pro Free. In January 2026 its first external agent, Pathology Explorer, launched inside Anthropic's Claude for Healthcare and Life Sciences through a Model Context Protocol (MCP) connector. The same day it announced a collaboration with NVIDIA on the next version of OwkinZero. Licenses followed: AstraZeneca signed a three-year K Pro agreement in May 2026 that includes competitive-intelligence agents, Sanofi signed a five-year agreement in June, and in September both Boehringer Ingelheim and Servier licensed K Pro together with Owkin's patient data.

Owkin has also narrowed what it does. In March 2026 it spun its diagnostics unit out as a separate company, Waiv, with 33 million dollars in financing led by OTB Ventures and Alpha Intelligence Capital. Waiv took the pathology-based tests MSIntuit, for colorectal cancer, and RlapsRisk BC, for breast cancer, which Owkin describes as CE-marked in Europe. The drug candidate OKN4395 is in a Phase 1 trial called INVOKE, sponsored by the affiliate Epkin, and Owkin incubated Bioptimus, a separate company building foundation models for biology.

The honest framing: Owkin's durable asset is its patient data, gathered through a network it puts at more than 100 academic and hospital partners, and K Pro is the lever that turns that data into something a pharma team will pay for. The productivity figures it publishes, such as a claimed 20-times gain for researchers, are the company's own measurements rather than independent results, and none of the license announcements disclose a deal value. What is measured is commercial uptake, with four large drugmakers signing between May and September 2026. Where Chai Discovery and Insilico Medicine design molecules, Owkin sells answers about patients, which puts it nearer to Tempus AI's data-and-analytics model.