Harlan Robins left Adaptive Biotechnologies to launch Harell Data, a $15M-funded platform for licensing scientific data to AI modelers. The model could unlock value for data-rich biotechs.
Adaptive Biotechnologies Corp currently carries an Alpha Score of n/a, giving AlphaScala's model a neutral read on the setup.
Harlan Robins raised $15 million for a new Bellevue startup called Harell Data. The company wants to fix a broken market: the groups spending millions to generate high-quality scientific data rarely get paid when AI developers use it.
Robins, co-founder and former chief scientific officer of Adaptive Biotechnologies (ADPT), said the idea came from watching the divide widen. AlphaFold succeeded because it drew on decades of public protein structures. In most of biology, generating comparable datasets takes years and millions of dollars. The entities that own that data have no secure, profitable way to share it, so it sits in silos.
“The goal of the company is to connect AI modelers to proprietary training sets to enable the solution of challenging scientific problems,” Robins said in an email to GeekWire. “At present, the entities that generate proprietary training data using their own technology and expense do not have a good way to commercialize the data. So they effectively sit on it.”
Harell Data Corp. is built as a secure bridge between data creators and AI modelers. The platform launches early access this week. Initial datasets come from Seattle-based A-Alpha Bio and Adaptive Biotechnologies. Robins said the company is starting with problems he knows best – computational medicine – but the data-silo problem spans materials science and imaging.
The funding round was led by Fuse and Cercano Management, with additional backers. Robins stepped back from his chief scientific officer role at Adaptive to start the venture; he continues to consult on scientific strategy there. Adaptive shares trade publicly at a $3.9 billion market value. Earlier this year, Adaptive spun out Digital Biotechnologies, a startup focused on DNA sequencing technology.
The read-through for the sector is straightforward. Biotech companies sitting on proprietary datasets – from clinical trial results to protein interaction maps – have had few ways to monetize that work. If Harell Data proves the model, it could create a new revenue stream for data-rich firms that currently treat their data as a cost center. Robins said the business, if it works, “should be able to enable solutions to really important problems.”
Harell Data’s 11-person team splits between Bellevue and Palo Alto. Chief Technology Officer Rakesh Nair, Head of Operations Saray Covey, and Head of Sales Analise Polsky round out the leadership. The name comes from Robins’ 8-year-old son, Ellis, who combined “Harlan” and “Ellis” into “Harell.”
The Timmerman Report first reported the funding.
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