Living Models develops foundational models for biological sequences — DNA, RNA, multi-omic data — rather than for natural language. Its aim is to create AI designed to decode life as a whole.
The company is headquartered in Paris (France) and Berkeley (California).
The founding team brings together diverse backgrounds and disciplines: Cyril Véran (UC Berkeley, serial entrepreneur), Léonard Strouk (École normale supérieure, biochemistry; research at UC Berkeley and NYU; founder of a previous generative AI company) and Bertrand Gakière (VP Biology, Université Paris-Saclay). The technical team includes PhDs from Huawei Noah’s Ark Lab, Owkin (a Paris-based specialist in AI applied to drug discovery, having raised over $300 million), Datadog, Mila and the École normale supérieure.
Research paper on BioRxiv: https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.02.23.706817v1
BOTANIC models available on Hugging Face: https://huggingface.co/living-models
