Biossil hits $1B unicorn on OpenAI-led $153M raise

Toronto biotech Biossil is Canada’s newest unicorn. The OpenAI Startup Fund led a US$153-million (about C$216-million) all-equity round that values the company at US$1 billion, co-founder and CEO Anthony Mouchantaf confirmed.

Founders Fund, Quiet Capital, Modern Capital, Golden Ventures, Panache Ventures, Duke University’s endowment and the Abu Dhabi Investment Council also participated. Proceeds go to expanding clinical development capacity and buying more discarded drug candidates for the pipeline.

Biossil’s pitch is capital recycling in pharma: use AI to spot molecules that stalled in someone else’s trials, then buy or license them and restart development without a from-scratch discovery clock. The firm exited stealth in April after roughly US$70 million in prior equity; active programs touch sickle cell disease, idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis, glioblastoma, breast cancer and Alzheimer’s. Mouchantaf says the company is building the “infrastructure” to marry AI and medicine from discovery through the clinic in both the United States and Canada.

The inflation read-through is scarce Canadian scale capital meeting a US$1-billion AI-biotech multiple while Ottawa still frets about productivity. Whether resuscitated drugs cut real healthcare costs later is the bet; the near-term signal is that Canadian biotech can still clear SoftBank-scale tickets when OpenAI writes the lead cheque.