Biolevate, a French startup automating knowledge workflows for pharmaceutical companies, said it raised €30 million ($34 million) in a Series A round co-led by RAISE France and Orange Ventures. The round drew participation from MSD Global Health Innovation Fund, Station F and existing backer EQT Ventures.
The company plans to double its 50-person workforce and open an office in Boston, targeting U.S. pharmaceutical customers in a market where AI adoption has been slower than in other industries. Drug developers need tools that satisfy regulatory scrutiny, not just speed up work, and Biolevate's pitch centers on what it calls "Evidence Trail" architecture. The system tracks every data source, decision and validation step, aiming to make AI-assisted work auditable in an industry where compliance failures can trigger billion-dollar consequences.
The timing reflects mounting pressure on pharma companies to accelerate drug development without sacrificing safety documentation. Literature reviews, safety surveillance and clinical document drafting still consume months of expert time, even as AI tools proliferate in less regulated sectors.
Revenue surge as major customers come aboard
Biolevate said its annual recurring revenue increased 20-fold over the past 12 months, according to the company. More than a dozen enterprise customers now use the platform in production environments, though the company declined to break out specific contract values. Customers include Sanofi, Elsevier and unnamed regulatory agencies, according to the company's press materials.
In June, Biolevate said it achieved what it described as state-of-the-art accuracy in multimodal evidence extraction for clinical and regulatory use cases, building on NVIDIA's BioNeMo Agent Toolkit. The company has been selective about its benchmarks—accuracy claims in pharmaceutical AI tend to invite scrutiny from compliance officers who must ultimately sign off on any automated output.
What the platform actually does
The platform turns AI-assisted tasks into governed workflows, the company says. Biolevate claims its system accelerates systematic literature reviews by 16-fold, cuts regulatory intelligence work by 80% and speeds safety signal triage by five times. The system can handle up to 100,000 concurrent agents, according to the company.
Target users include medical affairs teams, regulatory intelligence units, pharmacovigilance departments and clinical operations groups. Use cases range from drafting Periodic Safety Update Reports to generating competitive intelligence to quality-checking batch records. Whether those efficiency gains hold up under audit remains to be seen, though early customers appear willing to test the premise.
Team assembled from data infrastructure veterans
CEO Joël Belafa previously served as Director of Engineering at Dataiku, the data science platform that reached a $4.6 billion valuation in 2021. CTO Anas Laaroussi and Chief AI Officer Antoine de Torcy also came from Dataiku, giving the founding team deep experience in enterprise data workflows. COO Nathan Chen worked at Coloplast, the medical device maker.
Aymar Hénin, the entrepreneur behind RAISE France, joined Biolevate's board as Chairman with this round. Jérôme Berger, Orange's Head of Group Strategy & Venture Capital, also took a board seat.
EQT Ventures co-led Biolevate's €6 million seed round in November 2024. That earlier round drew angels including Mehdi Ghissassi, Head of Product at DeepMind, and the co-founders of Zoi.
Crowded field for regulated AI tools
Biolevate enters what industry observers describe as a competitive landscape for life sciences knowledge tools. Clarivate's Cortellis Regulatory Intelligence serves more than 80 markets. Causaly offers agentic AI for biomedical evidence retrieval. Benchling provides validated cloud infrastructure for regulated R&D environments. Each has taken a different approach to the core challenge: how to automate knowledge work in an industry where errors can halt drug approvals or trigger safety recalls.
The market opportunity appears substantial. Oliver Wyman projected worldwide prescription drug sales will exceed $1.7 trillion by 2030 in a December 2025 report. IQVIA estimated in March that the global medicine market will reach roughly $2.6 trillion by 2030 at list prices, growing 5% to 8% annually. Whether AI tools capture a meaningful slice of that spending depends partly on regulatory comfort with automated decision support.
IP strategy and compliance posture
Biolevate has drafted seven patent applications and filed two in Europe. The startup holds ISO/IEC 27001 and 27701 certifications and offers private cloud or on-premises deployment options, a requirement for many pharma customers with strict data residency policies.
The company was selected for France's French Tech 2030 program in the current cohort. It's based in Sucy-en-Brie, a Paris suburb, and was founded in 2023.
Expansion into U.S. market
"Customers are increasingly embracing AI automation at scale, grounded in evidence and under rigorous human oversight," Belafa said. "This milestone, paired with the extraordinary traction we are experiencing, confirms that we are on track to build a global champion in this emerging category."
Hénin said Biolevate is addressing what he called one of the most important challenges in life sciences: turning AI's potential into "trusted, evidence-grade automation that can operate at scale in regulated environments."
The Boston office represents a calculated bet. U.S. pharmaceutical companies account for the largest share of global drug development spending, and face mounting pressure to speed up approval timelines without relaxing safety standards. Biolevate is hiring platform security engineers and AI solutions engineers, according to recent LinkedIn postings, as it prepares to scale operations across two continents.
