Unlearn funding: Every round, investor, and valuation (2026)

Unlearn builds AI "digital twins" of clinical trial participants. Each twin is a forecast of how one patient's disease would progress on a placebo, which lets drug developers run trials with smaller control groups. The San Francisco company sells this to pharmaceutical and biotech companies running studies in diseases such as Alzheimer's, ALS, and Huntington's.

Unlearn has raised about $135 million across seven rounds since 2017, all of it equity. Its last round, a $50 million Series C led by Altimeter Capital, closed in February 2024. The company launched as Unlearn.AI and now goes by Unlearn, though its legal name is still Unlearn.ai, Inc.

Its backers are mostly deep-tech and AI specialist funds rather than healthcare generalists, plus one Japanese drugmaker and the investment arm of Canada's Weston family. Let's dive into Unlearn's funding history.

Unlearn has raised money every one to two years since 2017. Two $50 million rounds account for about three quarters of the total.

Unlearn was founded in 2017 by Charles Fisher, Aaron Smith, and Jon Walsh, three physicists who had worked together on the machine learning team at the virtual reality company Leap Motion. Fisher had also been a principal scientist at Pfizer.

DCVC, the deep-tech fund formerly called Data Collective, wrote the first check and its biotech fund, DCVC Bio, led the seed round in 2019. The amounts of those two early rounds come from funding databases, not company announcements.

The first announced round came in April 2020, when 8VC led a $12 million Series A and its principal Francisco Gimenez joined the board. The company had about 15 employees at the time and planned to double that within a year. In November 2020, the Japanese drugmaker Eisai joined Epic Ventures and Alumni Ventures Group in an extension that brought the Series A to $15 million.

Unlearn's Series B arrived in April 2022. Insight Partners led the $50 million round, and Insight managing director Dylan Morris took a board seat. The company had about 40 employees and planned to double again while moving into new disease areas.

Five months later, the European Medicines Agency (EMA) issued a qualification opinion for PROCOVA, Unlearn's statistical method, accepting it as a primary analysis in phase 2 and 3 trials with continuous outcomes. The US Food and Drug Administration later told the company the method does not deviate from its current guidance.

In March 2023, Radical Ventures and Wittington Ventures put in $15 million, and Reuters reported that the round valued Unlearn at $265 million. Mira Murati, then chief technology officer of OpenAI, joined Unlearn's board the same month, weeks after Microsoft's multibillion-dollar commitment to OpenAI.

The Series C followed in February 2024. Altimeter Capital led it, every major earlier backer returned, and the company said total funding had passed $130 million. No new round has been announced in the more than two and a half years since.

Only one Unlearn valuation has been made public. The $265 million figure from March 2023 came from Reuters, and neither the company nor its investors have published a price for any other round.

The 2023 price was about three times the roughly $85 million Unlearn had raised by then. Forge Global, a marketplace for private company shares, shows a Series C valuation of about $368 million, but Unlearn has not confirmed it. How ownership is split between founders, employees, and funds is not public either.

Unlearn's cap table is built from three groups: deep-tech venture funds that backed the founders early, growth investors that led the two $50 million rounds, and strategic backers with ties to pharma and consumer industries.

Altimeter led the Series C in 2024. The Menlo Park firm is best known for growth bets on software companies. Partner Pauline Yang said Altimeter backed Unlearn to help cut the number of participants trials need, which lowers costs for drugmakers.

Insight led the Series B in 2022, took part in the Series C, and has kept a board seat through managing director Dylan Morris. The New York firm writes large growth checks across software.

8VC, the firm founded by Palantir co-founder Joe Lonsdale, led the Series A and still holds a board seat through Francisco Gimenez, now a partner. DCVC has backed Unlearn since the pre-seed. Kiersten Stead, managing partner of DCVC Bio, sits on the board.

Radical Ventures, a Toronto AI fund, joined in the Series B and co-led the 2023 round. Partner Rob Toews called Unlearn one of the most original applications of AI when the Series C was announced.

Wittington Ventures is the venture arm of Wittington Investments, the Weston family holding company that controls George Weston Limited and, through it, the grocer Loblaw. It co-led the 2023 round and returned for the Series C.

Eisai is the only drugmaker on the cap table. An Eisai Innovation director said at the time of the 2020 extension that Unlearn's approach could address slow enrollment and high failure rates in trials.

Mubadala Capital, part of Abu Dhabi's sovereign wealth group, joined the Series A, Series B, and Series C. Epic Ventures, Alumni Ventures Group, and Necessary Venture Capital round out the list.

Ann Taylor, a former chief medical officer at AstraZeneca, sits on the board as an independent director. Murati, who left OpenAI in 2024, no longer appears on Unlearn's board list.

Unlearn spends its funding on people, data, and model development. Every round announcement since 2020 has named hiring as a priority.

The core product is a set of disease-specific models the company calls Digital Twin Generators. They are trained on historical clinical trial and patient records, so a large share of spending goes to acquiring and cleaning data. In February 2026, for example, Unlearn gained access to the CHDI Foundation's Enroll-HD dataset to improve its Huntington's disease model.

The Series C also paid for a commercial build-out. Unlearn said the money would expand customer-facing teams and product engineering, and in May 2024 it hired Steve Herne, a former chief commercial officer at the clinical research services company WCG, into the same role. It then added a chief technology officer, Krates Ng, in April 2025 and its first vice president of product in July 2025.

Unlearn makes money by selling its models and analyses to trial sponsors. Named customers and partners include Merck KGaA, Acumen Pharmaceuticals, VectorY Therapeutics, SOLA Biosciences, Trace Neuroscience, and remynd. The company does not disclose revenue, pricing, or the number of trials it supports.

Unlearn is shifting from research to selling products under Herne, who became CEO in September 2024 when Fisher moved to chief scientist. Fisher no longer appears on the leadership page, and the company's 2026 deals point to biotechs running early-phase neurology trials, such as ALS studies at VectorY and SOLA that use digital twins as a comparison group in place of a placebo arm.

In January 2026, Unlearn launched TrialPioneer, a workspace for planning trials before the protocol is locked, which takes its products beyond trial analysis. In April, it said it had built a cancer model trained on about 300,000 tumor biopsies. It also won Fierce's 2026 AI Innovation Award for clinical trial design.

Unlearn has not announced a new round since February 2024 and has no public IPO plans. The main risk is regulatory: the EMA opinion dates from 2022 and covers a narrow use case, while the FDA's January 2025 draft guidance on AI sets no numeric standard for how accurate a model must be. The next raise will likely depend on proof that drugmakers use the twins in late-stage trials, at a time when AI startups take the largest share of startup funding.

Unlearn has raised about $135 million across seven rounds since 2017. The largest were a $50 million Series B in April 2022 and a $50 million Series C in February 2024. The company has not reported any debt.

Unlearn's lead investors are Altimeter Capital, Insight Partners, 8VC, DCVC, and Radical Ventures. Other backers include DCVC Bio, Wittington Ventures, Mubadala Capital, Eisai, Epic Ventures, Alumni Ventures Group, and Necessary Venture Capital.

Unlearn was valued at $265 million in March 2023, according to Reuters. That is the only valuation the company's backers have made public. The value set by the 2024 Series C has not been disclosed.

No. Unlearn is private and has not filed for an IPO. Its shares are not traded on any stock exchange.

Unlearn is owned by its founders, employees, and venture investors. Co-founders Aaron Smith and Jon Walsh still lead AI and science at the company. The largest outside holders are likely the funds that led its rounds, including Altimeter, Insight Partners, 8VC, and DCVC, though exact stakes are not public.