Mantis Biotech Secures $7.4M to Build Human Digital Twins

New York-based Mantis Biotech has raised $7.4 million in seed funding to expand its pioneering work in creating “digital twins” of humans. These physics-based, predictive models are designed to overcome a significant hurdle in biomedical research: the scarcity of reliable, representative data, particularly for rare diseases and unique medical conditions that often stymie the effectiveness of large language models.

The funding round was led by Decibel VC, with contributions from Y Combinator, Liquid 2, and several angel investors. Mantis Biotech plans to deploy this capital for strategic hiring, advertising, marketing initiatives, and strengthening its go-to-market strategies as it pushes its innovative platform forward.

Medicine’s reliance on structured data often leaves AI models struggling with edge cases, where patient privacy concerns and the sheer rarity of conditions limit data availability. Mantis Biotech's solution involves synthesizing disparate data sources to construct comprehensive digital representations of the human body, encompassing anatomy, physiology, and behavior.

According to Georgia Witchel, Mantis' founder and CEO, the company's platform integrates various data types, from medical imaging and biometric sensors to textbooks and motion capture. An LLM-based system then routes, validates, and synthesizes these diverse data streams. Crucially, this synthesized information is processed through a sophisticated physics engine to generate high-fidelity, predictive models.

This physics engine is central to Mantis’s ability to augment existing data, grounding the generated synthetic information in realistic anatomical physics. Witchel illustrated this by explaining how easily their system could create a dataset for hand-pose estimation for an individual missing a finger—a scenario where real-world, labeled data is virtually nonexistent. By modifying their physics model, they can regenerate the model to include such variations.

Mantis envisions wide-ranging applications for these digital twins across the biomedical industry, especially where patient information is fragmented, unstructured, or difficult to access due to ethical and regulatory restrictions. Witchel highlighted the ethical advantage: “I think that’s going to open up people to this idea that humans can be tested on when you’re using virtual humans. I feel currently, people operate with the exact opposite mindset, which totally makes sense, because people’s privacy should be respected.”

The startup has already demonstrated success in professional sports, an industry with a keen interest in modeling high-performing athletes. One of Mantis’s primary clients is an NBA team, for whom they create digital representations tracking athletes' performance metrics, such as jump mechanics over time, correlating them with factors like sleep patterns and training load, to predict injury likelihood.

Looking ahead, Mantis Biotech aims to further develop its technology and eventually launch its platform to the general public, with a focus on preventative healthcare. The company is also working to serve pharmaceutical laboratories and researchers engaged in FDA trials, providing valuable insights into how patients respond to various treatments.

FAQ

Q: What problem is Mantis Biotech trying to solve with digital twins?

A: Mantis Biotech is addressing medicine's data availability problem, particularly in edge cases like rare diseases, where reliable and representative data for training AI models is scarce due to ethical constraints and the inherent rarity of conditions.

Q: How does Mantis Biotech create its digital twins?

A: The company's platform gathers data from various sources (textbooks, sensors, imaging), uses an LLM-based system to synthesize it, and then runs this information through a physics engine. This engine creates high-fidelity, predictive models of human anatomy, physiology, and behavior, grounding the synthetic data in realistic physical principles.

Q: What are some current and future applications for Mantis Biotech's digital twins?

A: Currently, Mantis Biotech is working with professional sports teams, including an NBA client, to model athlete performance and predict injury risks. In the future, the company plans to target preventative healthcare, assist pharmaceutical labs and researchers with FDA trials, and explore other applications where human performance and health can be virtually simulated and analyzed.