Harlan Robins spent years as the co-founder and chief scientific officer of Adaptive Biotechnologies, helping build massive datasets to decode the human immune system.
But as artificial intelligence exploded across life sciences, he recognized a growing divide: the groups spending immense resources to generate high-quality research data rarely receive fair compensation when AI developers use those assets to build commercial tools.
Now, the veteran biotech founder is stepping out with a new Bellevue startup called Harell Data that just scored $15 million in funding from Fuse, Cercano Management and others.
“The goal of the company is to connect AI modelers to proprietary training sets to enable the solution of challenging scientific problems,” said Robins 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.”
High-profile successes like AlphaFold thrived because they drew on decades of publicly available, experimentally derived protein structures, Robins said.
But in many critical areas of biology and medicine, generating high-quality datasets requires millions of dollars and years of labor. The entities that own this data currently have no secure, profitable way to share it, so it remains sitting in isolated silos.
Harell Data Corp. is built to serve as a secure bridge between data creators and world-class AI modelers. It works like this:
- Secure Cloud Platform: Data creators host their proprietary datasets on Harell’s platform, allowing machine learning groups to train models without the raw underlying data ever leaving the secure environment.
- Direct Revenue Sharing: Instead of waiting years for speculative downstream drug royalties, data owners earn a direct share of the compute revenue generated during training runs.
- Compound Value: As models improve through training on these rich datasets, the intrinsic value of the underlying data becomes more valuable.
While the startup is initially targeting problems Robins knows best — largely around computational medicine — he emphasizes that the data-silo problem spans across scientific disciplines, from materials science to imaging.
“If the business works right, we should be able to enable solutions to really important problems,” he said.
The company’s name also carries a fun personal story. When Robins decided to start the venture, he asked his 8-year-old son, Ellis, for a recommendation. Within seconds, his son suggested “Harell”: a combination of “Harlan” and “Ellis.”
“No offense to the large cap cloud compute companies, but it sounds better to me than any of their names, and things seem to have worked out OK for them so I went with it,” said Robins.
Robins, who continues to serve as a consultant focusing on scientific strategy at Adaptive Biotechnologies, has built an 11-person team split between Bellevue and Palo Alto, California. The team includes Chief Technology Officer Rakesh Nair, Head of Operations Saray Covey, and Head of Sales Analise Polsky.
Early access for the platform is launching this week with initial datasets provided by partners including Seattle-based A-Alpha Bio and Adaptive Biotechnologies.
Adaptive, which is publicly-traded with a market value of $3.9 billion, earlier this year spun out a new startup called Digital Biotechnologies that is developing DNA sequencing technology.
The biotech publication Timmerman Report first reported on the news of Harell Data.
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