Spontaneous Application at Aqemia (Paris, France)

Aqemia· Paris, France·1d ago

Role details

Work type

Hybrid

Employment

Contract

Job description

Spontaneous Application

If you don’t see an open position that fits you, but are still interested in joining the team, please use this form.

Culture: Mission-driven, strongly collaborative international team at the crossroads of technology and life sciences; values collaboration, ownership, and meaningful impact.
Work Model: Hybrid — full-time contracts in Paris and/or London.
Engineering & Science Culture: Multidisciplinary team (Research 41%, Technical 17%) with a flat-ish seniority mix (Specialist 33%, Senior 14%, Manager 13%); talent sourced from top institutions including ENS, Inria, BenevolentAI, Exscientia, and BCG.
Compensation Benchmarks: Software Engineer EUR 50,320/year; MLOps Engineer EUR 69,104/year; Intern Software Engineer EUR 15,634/month.
Open Roles (sample): Senior Software Engineer, Staff Software Engineer, Senior Data Engineer, Engineering Manager - Compute Team, AI R&D Manager, Computational Chemist, Drug Discovery Program Leader, Senior People Operations Partner.
Employer Rating: 3.4/5 from 21 reviews (Work-Life 3.6, Compensation 3.6, Culture 3.4, Career 3.5).
Impact: Direct contribution to inventing new medicines for unsolved diseases, with science moving fast and everyone contributing to the drug discovery pipeline.

One-liner: Aqemia is a Paris-based drug discovery company combining generative AI and deep physics to invent novel medicines for difficult-to-treat diseases.
Entity Type: Private (venture-backed, post-Series A)
Headquarters: Paris, France (with a London, UK office at 29-31 Euston Road)
Founded: 2019
Founders: Maximilien Levesque (CEO, physicist, former professor at École Normale Supérieure/CNRS) and Emmanuelle Martiano-Rolland (COO, former Principal at Boston Consulting Group)

Primary Industry: Biotechnology Research / AI-driven drug discovery
Target Customers: B2B — large pharmaceutical and biotech companies via partnerships, plus wholly owned proprietary drug programs
Mission: To invent new medicines — never me-toos — tackling major diseases such as oncology, using physics-based generative AI to discover drug candidates beyond the reach of traditional R&D, without dependence on experimental data.

QEMI Platform: A proprietary drug discovery engine fusing fast, atomic-scale physics with state-of-the-art generative AI to predict drug-target affinities and design novel molecules rapidly and accurately. The platform removes the need for experimental training data, enabling frugal, scalable discovery.
Wholly Owned Drug Pipeline: A portfolio of proprietary programs demonstrating superior efficacy and non-toxicity in vivo, with lead programs progressing through optimization.
Partnered Programs: Collaborations with leading pharmaceutical and biotech companies, alongside plans to spin out drug candidates into biotech spin-offs for clinical trials.
Moonshot Programs: Indication-first initiatives targeting single diseases with high unmet medical need, running multiple shots on goal across different targets.

Valuation: Not disclosed
Annual Revenue: USD 7.1M (latest available estimate)
Total Funding: USD 119.7M across 8 rounds, including:
- Pre-Seed (2019): USD 1.2M led by Elaia
- Series A (May 2021): USD 10.8M led by Eurazeo
- Series A (Jan 2021): USD 10.2M
- Series A (Oct 2022): USD 19.5M led by Bpifrance
- Grant (May 2025): USD 7.4M from France 2030
Notable Investors/Partners: Eurazeo, Bpifrance, Elaia, France 2030; collaborations with top pharmaceutical companies
Growth Signals: Headcount of 76 employees (+13.2% YoY); workforce distributed across France (63%), UK (24%), and Switzerland (1%); part of the French Tech 120 program; 22,927 LinkedIn followers (+38.6% yearly); 11 active job postings with +37.5% monthly growth

Deep Physics Foundation: Built on 12+ years of academic research in theoretical physics at CNRS, École Normale Supérieure, and the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge; recognized by the American Institute of Physics with 40+ peer-reviewed publications.
No Experimental Data Dependence: Unlike conventional AI drug discovery, Aqemia's algorithms do not require experimental training data, enabling faster, cheaper, and more innovative molecule discovery.
Scalable Engine: The QEMI platform allows the company to pursue dozens of drug candidates simultaneously, including "moonshot" programs targeting high-unmet-need diseases.
Frugal, Efficient Discovery: Physics-first approach scales drug discovery cost-effectively, making it attractive for both proprietary and partnered programs.

Scaling the pipeline to dozens of wholly or partly owned drug candidates and placing them into a constellation of biotech spin-offs for clinical trials.
Balancing broad exploration across multiple targets with indication-first "moonshot" programs in high unmet need areas.
Expanding collaborations with top pharmaceutical companies while growing proprietary programs.
Continuing to recruit exceptional talent across life sciences, AI, software engineering, computational chemistry, and drug discovery in Paris and London.

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