Apheris AI

Apheris AI is a German software company founded in 2019 by CEO Robin Röhm and CTO Michael Höh. The company provides a platform for collaborative data ecosystems, allowing organizations to analyze and train machine learning models on decentralized datasets without compromising privacy or security. This is achieved through federated computing, where data remains in its secure local environment and is not moved or shared.

The founders' backgrounds were crucial to the company's creation. Robin Röhm has a diverse background in medicine, philosophy, and mathematics and previously encountered the limitations of data centralization due to regulatory constraints in a prior startup. Michael Höh holds a Ph.D. in physics and computer science and gained experience building digital solutions and AI applications for industrial clients while at The Boston Consulting Group. His doctoral research at Forschungszentrum Jülich involved developing software infrastructure for distributed data.

Apheris primarily serves the life sciences, pharmaceutical, and healthcare sectors. Its client roster includes major pharmaceutical companies like Johnson & Johnson, Roche, Sanofi, AbbVie, and AstraZeneca, as well as leading hospitals. The company's business model is centered on its flagship product, the Apheris Compute Gateway. This software agent enables secure, governed data collaboration for analytics and AI. Organizations can connect to distributed data to build models, from statistical queries to deep learning, while maintaining control and a full audit trail. The platform is designed to be use-case and AI-model agnostic and integrates with privacy-enhancing technologies like homomorphic encryption and differential privacy.

A significant application of Apheris's technology is in powering federated data networks for drug discovery. For example, the company provides the technical infrastructure for the AI Structural Biology (AISB) Consortium, which brings together top pharmaceutical firms to collaboratively fine-tune AI models for drug discovery on proprietary data without exposing sensitive information. By enabling access to siloed data, Apheris aims to accelerate innovation in areas like protein complex prediction. The company has secured significant funding to support its growth, including a Series A round that brought its total funding to $20.8 million, with investments from firms like OTB Ventures, eCAPITAL, Octopus Ventures, and Heal Capital.

Keywords: federated computing, data collaboration, privacy-preserving analytics, life sciences data, secure AI, decentralized data, Apheris Compute Gateway, drug discovery AI, machine learning, data security, computational governance, AI Structural Biology Consortium, Robin Röhm, Michael Höh, pharmaceutical data, healthcare analytics, data privacy, federated learning, secure data networks, collaborative AI