How the “OpenAI of stem cell therapy” attracts partners without marketing

When I came across a company branding itself as the “OpenAI of stem cell therapy”, my marketer’s curiosity was instantly piqued.

Using the analogy of 'The [Insert Big Name] of something' is a familiar trope for startups, but it’s still relatively rare in biotech—so I wanted to uncover the story behind this one.

I reached out to Somite.ai, the company behind this bold branding, and managed to connect with its co-founder and CEO, Micha Breakstone. Despite it being the first episode of my podcast, Micha enthusiastically agreed to be my guest (that’s the entrepreneurial spirit!).

In this inaugural episode, I wanted to explore two things: how AI companies in life sciences position themselves, and how early-stage startups approach marketing. As you’ll see in the interview below, Somite’s story provides a fascinating case study for both.

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The interview below is a transcript of our conversation, lightly edited for clarity and conciseness.

The magazine Forbes called your company “the open AI of stem cell therapy”. What does this mean for you and your team?

Micha Breakstone: You know, a lot of people use AI and maybe this analogy is kind of hype, but in our case, I hope it's actually true. I guess for three main reasons.

The first is when I think of OpenAI, it was the first to really commercialize foundation models. And we're building the infrastructure and the foundation models for understanding the communication between cells. So in that regard, we hope to do to the “language of communication between cells” the same that OpenAI did to the communication between people or natural language.

Number two is kind of like OpenAI was the first to do that and a slew of competitors or other players came after and we believe we're the first to actually unlock this ability to decipher the kind of hidden dimensions or the signals that cells communicate in and differentiate with.

And the third is just the absolutely huge opportunity that is upon us, right? Just like OpenAI unlocked these endless opportunities with language, we hope to do the same with cells, cellular therapy, and human repair in general.

Somite was founded in October last year, at the same time as a wave of AI companies in the biotech sector. Why did you launch at this time and why are you confident in this space?

M.B.: I was thinking of my next company for a while. A very good friend has been very close friends with one of the professors who's now a scientific co-founder, Allon Klein. We go back 25 years. I reached out to him because I was looking for something deeply impactful at the intersection of AI and therapeutics. I asked him if he had anything interesting for me, at which point he said, Micha, let's stay friends. And I said, Allon, give me something interesting. He said, let's stay friends. The third time I asked, he introduced me to Cliff Tabin, who's the Chair of the Department of Genetics at Harvard Medical School, and Olivier Pourquie, another professor at the genetics department and US National Academy of Sciences member.

They were thinking of building a company in the space of cell therapy and they were seeking help from a repeat entrepreneur. It wasn't premeditated. I was just looking to do my passion.

The CEO of NVIDIA recently had this incredible quote on the fact that biology now has the opportunity to become an engineering problem. And once things become an engineering problem, they have the opportunity to build upon everything that has been accumulated thus far in scale and kind of completely transform a field. And as I was thinking about what areas I wanted to work in, it stood out that biology, chemistry, or physics would be the next frontier. So, it was clear to me I wanted to do something there.

Having sold a few businesses and done pretty well for ourselves. It was important for me to leave a legacy and build something that is deeply impactful. So for me, naturally, I looked at therapeutics, and I was looking for incredible people who had groundbreaking novel science on the one hand, and on the other hand, I could marry it with deep AI. So that was kind of the decision to do that at that point.

But really, I was following my passion, and I wouldn't start a company that I didn't think had a chance of being a multi-billion dollar opportunity on the one hand. On the other hand, it was really important for me to follow something I cared about and wanted to do.

More and more AI drug development companies are rebranding themselves as TechBio rather than Biotech. Is this distinction important to you and where do you see Somite?

M.B.: Unquestionably, Somite does tech bio, it's not biotech. It's hugely important for me.

Biotech is a company that is more traditional, usually developing therapeutics, small molecules, monoclonal antibodies, cell and gene therapy, etc. But basically, you're betting the company on a therapeutic, a program, or even a series of programs. In our case, the innovation is the technology itself in the sense of the machine learning or AI. We're developing a platform that in and of itself is an innovation. And we are betting the company's fate not on a specific program or a series of programs, but rather on the capabilities of the technology to spawn an infinite amount of programs. So it's a big difference. I think the risk profile of the company is very different.

Of course, we also have the wet labs and the programs themselves, but we place a deep emphasis on our technological capabilities. It's critical for us to build this very, very robust platform that actually owns its own fate.

Does that make the partnership models that we usually see in biotech different for you?

M.B.: I think the best way to think about it is think of Alpha Fold 3 (the AI model developed by Google DeepMind and Isomorphic Labs that can accurately predict the structure of proteins) where there's a server and anybody can use it for free, but if you want to use it commercially or you need some managed solution, you need to pay up. We're going to do something quite similar.

We haven't yet done a general availability release for AlphaStem, which is our platform, but it's up and running internally on our servers, and the results are pretty great. The idea is to launch it commercially in the next six to nine months and compel people to use it.

The concept of the digital twin is not necessarily easy for everyone to understand. And then you're mixing it with stem cell therapy, which is another layer of complexity. How do you balance this really technical topic with the need to make your message accessible?

M.B.: It's a challenge. I think it is Einstein who said that if you are not able to explain what you're doing to an elementary school kid, then you don't understand what you're doing yourself. There's a lot of elegance in distilling a message, and we mostly use analogies.

Messaging is important, but when we are engaging the top scientists, the science speaks for itself, right? Our view of the world is one where the digital twins are more of a tool for explaining things. The vision is to harness or leverage AI to basically usher in a new age of human repair. And the mission is also simple. It's transforming cellular biology into a compute-bound engineering challenge.

So I think at of the day, the messaging is relatively clear at the high level of vision and mission. We build up this platform, we're calling it Cellular AI and explaining what are the different components of the platform—Alpha Stem, the lab module, the cell therapies—and how we're leveraging all of that to transform the production of cells into something that is scalable.

You have already raised $10 million in investment. What was your communication strategy to convince investors to join you?

M.B.: In truth, we were kind of lucky. I built a few companies in the past, so I put in the first check, and I was planning on funding the company for a while. I have some good friends in the VC space and when they learned that I was doing a new company, they asked to come in. So, the first money was relatively easy.

Then, the next five million was actually even easier. We had a few companies that read about us and reached out.

There is a lot of hype in cell therapy and AI, but I think if you look at the caliber of the scientific co-founders of Somite, you understand that you would not be able to convince people of that caliber to put their name on it unless there was a real breakthrough in really deep science.

We were very lucky to attract money towards us rather than having to go out. One of our most important partners is a Japanese pharma company that had reached out to us, Astellas, and invested a couple of millions. So we were very lucky. We actually turned down more money than we accepted.

Your first companies were in the technology industry, not biotech. What are the main communication challenges in biotech that you haven't seen in other industries?

M.B.: Biotech is a different animal than tech. They both have the same word, “tech”, but they're very, very different. Biotech behaves or operates at different speeds, different cadences, different scales, different scales of money, and different risk profiles.

I would not have built a biotech company earlier. I believe in companies that are founder-led, where the founder has the chance to actually change the trajectory of the company and influence it. When you're developing a therapy, you can just pray, right? There's very little you can do to change the outcome. You can do everything right and still fail, which is also the case in tech, but the chances are more determined by you as a person.

And at Somite, we’re building a platform to mitigate the risk of failing because of a drug failure. The drug may fail, 10 drugs may fail, and the company will still be a huge success.

So yes, the ecosystems, the way people think about risk, the way people think about reward, the way people think about investment timelines, it's all very, very different between biotech and tech.

You recently received Orphan Drug and Rare Pediatric Disease Designation from the FDA for your induced muscular dystrophy program. Does this play a role in your communication strategy?

M.B.: I think so. Getting that recognition from the FDA is very serious, it means the FDA is taking us seriously. The agency looks at us as a future potential solution. It's high recognition.

As we prepare for pre-IND work at the end of the year, I think it shows investors that the potential of our platform is not just up in the air and it's not AI hype, it's actually being taken very seriously by the people who matter, namely the agency.

How do you approach your public branding? For example, do you use social media to promote Somite?

M.B.: We use LinkedIn and X. We have put in some effort there, but not enough. And I think that education of the market is really important, especially in a nascent market like ours. So, the plan is definitely to tell our story more prolifically and reach a wider audience.

I think we were very lucky, as I shared, that some great companies and people reached out to us. But I think as we want to expand and go bigger, communicating is going to be really important. It's all about audiences.

I usually think of a great quote from my scientific co-founder, Cliff Tabin, who likes to say, “I don't want to read about my work in the New York Times before I read about it in the New England Journal of Medicine”. So, social media is a valid channel to get your message out there, but I also think that the science absolutely needs to speak for itself.

You recently appointed a VP of Strategy and Operations. What's the thinking behind that role?

M.B.: We brought in an exceptionally strong translational team but we were lacking operational excellence. So it was really important, as we scale, to build up that muscle within the company.

Execution and strategy are not always the same thing, but I think getting somebody who is great for both is really good because, at the end of the day, strategy is about operating and choosing the right focus to operate on.

Shai, our VP of Strategy and Operations, doesn't have any biological background per se, but he's a graduate of the Israeli program Talpiot, which is the top academic program in the country. He’s brilliant, with a deep scientific background on the one hand, and on the other hand, a huge amount of operational background and strategic background. So, it made a ton of sense.

His role is helping us turn the company into a well-oiled machine, making sure that the machine is operating on the things we actually care about, like putting together the right financial models, the right operational models to leverage the platform and make sure we have the right strategy to compel great partners to start working with us.

For someone doing science marketing at a similar company, what would you advise?

M.B.: I think at the end of the day, marketing needs to serve the goals of the business. So the question is, why are they doing marketing? If it's to be in the newspaper and show your mom, that's probably not a great idea. If it's to drive specific partnerships, then tailor the marketing towards those partnerships.

Find the right channels, the right avenues, and where to communicate. Tailor what you're doing in marketing to your end goals and make sure that you're serving the company and its goals correctly.

Some companies just don't need to do marketing. I invested in a few companies that have very, very little marketing and they're doing phenomenally well, and they're happy with that. Other companies need marketing in order to survive.

Just ask yourself why you're doing the

marketing and what attention you're trying to attract and why. There could be many different reasons. Attracting top talent is different than attracting commercial attention than attracting financial attention. So, there needs to be a really good reason for why you're doing what you're doing.

Is marketing also tied to the development stage of the company?

M.B.: 100%. For example, my sense is that Europe is more risk-averse than Silicon Valley or Israel where I come from. So maybe part of the marketing there is just to establish that this isn't as risky as one might perceive.

Is there a book on science communication you would recommend?

M.B.: There's a great scientific book in my space called The Song of the Cell, by Siddhartha Mukherjee. It’s a beautiful book about cellular biology, which is a great intro to this space.

This wraps up my interview with Micha. What struck me most was how press coverage by a generalist publication boosted Somite's ability to attract significant capital. While it’s not an easy feat to replicate, many biotech startups have impressive technologies that could catch the media’s interest. So, investing a bit of time in building press relationships can really pay off.

I also now see why the emerging TechBio field is gaining momentum. For one, it highlights a distinct approach—focusing on enabling technology rather than just therapeutic assets. But it’s also an effective way to reduce perceived risks for investors and collaborators. In short, it’s a smart communication strategy!