Czech startup Carta Genum develops virtual bioinformatician

The Czech startup Carta Genum received a pre-seed investment of €40,000 from the Czech Founders VC fund to develop a platform for spatial biology. The project, led by scientists Lukáš Valihrach and Daniel Žucha from the Institute of Biotechnology of the Czech Academy of Sciences, is leading to the development of virtual bioinformatics—a tool that will enable biologists to analyze large and complex scientific data without the need for programming.

The platform aims to remove one of the main obstacles to current research, which is the time-consuming and technically demanding work with extreme amounts of data. This virtual colleague will help scientists focus directly on formulating and testing research hypotheses. "We are not building a black box that just spits out results. The key for us is the principle of keeping the expert at the center of decision-making. Biologists have expert knowledge that even the best algorithm cannot replace. Our platform and AI agents simply remove the barrier of writing code," outlined Daniel Žucha.

The investment and entry into the Sherpa acceleration program will enable the startup's founders to transform their know-how into a scalable product. The startup already successfully cooperates with prestigious institutions such as the University of Cambridge and SOTIO Biotech, confirming the high market demand for the automation of bioinformatics processes. "At the same time, however, we have verified that manual analysis has its limits. We cannot clone ourselves. That is why we decided to change our strategy and develop a product that automates our processes," explained Lukáš Valihrach.

The startup is now preparing to deploy the platform in pilot projects with academic and industrial partners.

Source: https://www.wired.cz/news-beat/cesky-startup-carta-genum-vyviji-virtualniho-bioinformatika