BioNTech's $686 million investment in AI-powered InstaDeep

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Here's what we've got for you today:

• BioNTech's $686 million investment in AI-powered InstaDeep

• Paul Graham's Bot: Your Personal Guide to Startup Success

BioNTech's $686 million investment in AI-powered InstaDeep

German pharmaceutical giant BioNTech just announced plans to acquire AI solutions start-up InstaDeep for a whopping $686 million! This acquisition will help BioNTech with their AI drug discovery and the development of next-gen immunotherapies and vaccines.

But who is InstaDeep, you may ask? Well, they're a London-based company that specializes in custom AI decision-making systems for a variety of industries.

They've got a product line called DeepChain, which is an AI-powered, cloud-native protein design platform.

And even though BioNTech is in the biotech industry, after the acquisition is completed, InstaDeep plans to continue their work across industries like transport and logistics, industrial, and financial services. And it's not just BioNTech who's been a fan of InstaDeep - they've also previously collaborated with big names like Google, DeepMind, Nvidia, and Intel.

BioNTech had previously invested in InstaDeep in a series B round and has been working with the start-up since 2019. The two companies have been collaborating since November 2020 to develop novel medicines and an early warning system to detect and monitor high-risk COVID variants using AI and machine learning technology. And it's not just the technology that BioNTech is acquiring - all 240 of InstaDeep's employees will be joining BioNTech as well.

Reading about AI acquisitions this big is a huge win for the industry. We'll always cover these in the newsletter and can't help but look at the current AI landscape scanning for potential acquisition targets for big and established co's like BioNTech and others.

Paul Graham's Bot: Your Personal Guide to Startup Success

Introducing Paul Graham's Bot - your personal guide to startup success! Using OpenAI's embedding model, this bot dishes out answers from Paul's blog posts to answer your questions. We tried asking some tough questions, but it was only on the third try that we got a response.

Stick to the basic and generic questions, folks!

It failed the RunTheAI test with this answer to be honest but it's fun so try it out maybe you'll manage to get a better answer out of it.

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Chinese Room Argument:

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