LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman became a billionaire erstwhile Microsoft bought LinkedIn successful 2016 for $26.2 billion successful cash, and he has besides made his luck connected high-return investments successful much than 80 tech startups, including Airbnb, Groupon, and Flickr. He famously made $111 million from his first $37,500 finance successful Facebook.
Now Hoffman is turning his attraction to AI successful healthcare pinch a caller startup he introduced past week pinch co-founder Dr. Siddhartha Mukherjee: Manas AI. And this clip Hoffman has deeper hopes than conscionable a precocious return connected finance — he wants to thief cure cancer.
Manas is bringing AI to immoderate of the world's apical supplier improvement scientists to deepen their expertise and velocity up the complaint astatine which caller narcotics are discovered. The startup intends to merge researchers pinch precocious AI systems to much quickly fig retired really perchance life-saving narcotics could interact pinch the quality body.
Related: LinkedIn's Reid Hoffman: To Scale, Do Things That Don't Scale
Manas is initially turning its attraction to fierce cancers for illustration bosom cancer, prostate cancer, and lymphoma. Its semipermanent imagination is to fundamentally alteration really the manufacture discovers and develops caller medicines.
"Most group person had friends, family members, etc., who've died from crab aliases had superior crab problems," Hoffman told CNBC connected Monday. "If we tin make a immense quality connected this, and this is the benignant of point that AI tin make a immense quality in, it's the benignant of logic why AI tin beryllium awesome for humanity."
Reid Hoffman The Midway SF connected December 05, 2023, successful San Francisco, California. Photo by Kimberly White/Getty Images for WIRED
The startup has raised $24.6 cardinal successful seed backing truthful far, pinch Hoffman starring the backing information pinch task superior patient General Catalyst. It will run its AI systems successful information centers owned by Microsoft.
Related: Reid Hoffman: To Successfully Grow A Business, You Must 'Expect Chaos'
Mukherjee is simply a Columbia University professor and writer of "The Emperor of All Maladies," a book astir cancer. In 2016, he helped recovered Vor BioPharma, a compartment engineering company, and successful 2021 he founded Myeloid Therapeutics, a crab therapy startup.
Manas presently has 4 labor including Mukherjee and Hoffman, pinch Hoffman saying he serves arsenic the company's "AI guy" and Mukherjee arsenic the "bio guy." Manas' extremity is to merge the 2 fields.
"It isn't conscionable the champion of subject and it isn't conscionable the champion of AI, because either of those 2 [is] insufficient," Hoffman told CNBC. "You request to put those 2 together."
The AI healthcare assemblage saw important investments successful 2024. According to PitchBook, investors poured $10.5 cardinal into 511 healthcare AI deals successful 2024. Cancer screening AI startup Freenome raised the astir money retired of the group pinch a $254 cardinal Series F successful February 2024.