daniel cohen

valence labs

The Research and Applied AI Summit (RAAIS) is a community for entrepreneurs and researchers who accelerate the science and applications of AI technology. In the run up to our 8th annual event on June 14th 2024 in London, we’re running a series of speaker profiles to shed more light on what you can expect to learn on the day!

At RAAIS we have a focus on translating cutting edge technology and research into production-grade products for real-world problems.

Daniel Cohen is the President of Valence Labs, the research engine committed to advancing the frontier of AI in drug discovery within Recursion Pharmaceuticals.

He was previously the co-founder and CEO of Valence Discovery, which was building an AI-powered platform for molecular design and optimization. The company started at Mila, the Quebec AI Institute, under the guidance of Yoshua Bengio.

Following its acquisition by Recursion, Valence is now acting as an OpenAI/DeepMind for drug discovery within the business, combining the intellectual freedom of academia with the resources of industry. It was instrumental in securing a recent investment from and partnership with NVIDIA. The unit also developed LOWE (Large Language Model-Orchestrated Workflow Engine), software that allows users to perform complex drug discovery tasks using a natural language interface. Valence Labs and Recursion Pharmaceuticals both announced their strategic expansion into London where they will be building local teams.

Before starting Valence, Daniel studied cognitive science and computational neuroscience at McGill University in Canada.