Software & data infrastructure · Biomanufacturing
Invert
Software that pulls data off bioreactors and analytical instruments, harmonizes it, and since October 2025 answers questions about it in plain language. Twenty million dollars of investor money is on file with the SEC. Not one customer is named in public.
A model that worked and could not run
A large drug maker had built a digital twin of its upstream process. Over two million dollars of Ambr250 hardware. Six months of data science work. By the company’s own account, the model was good.
It sat idle. The live run data it needed lived on an isolated control PC, reachable only through a separate bridge machine. Scientists hand carried snippets of it to the data science team several times a day, matching each one to the right batch. Even when data arrived, parameter names differed from instrument to instrument, so the model could not consume it without another round of manual reconciliation.
“The digital twin was functional. The data infrastructure required to operate it was not.”
That sentence, from Invert’s own case study, is the company in one line. The science was finished. The plumbing was not.
Two hundred hours before the science starts
Bioprocessing is the business of growing things in tanks: antibodies, cell therapies, enzymes, yeast, cultured protein. A single fed batch run throws off weeks of sensor time series, plus daily offline samples, plus downstream results for titer, glycosylation and charge variants. None of it lines up by itself.
Martin Permin, Invert’s co-founder and CEO, put the cost of that misalignment at roughly 200 hours of manual work per experiment in a 2024 podcast interview. His estimate of the usual stack was blunter: about 80 percent of the companies he walks into are running a file share on top of a data management suite, with Excel or JMP doing the actual analysis.
Machine learning in bioprocessing stalls, Permin argues, not on algorithms but on data preparation.
Two childhood friends and a pandemic
Permin is not a biologist, and says so first. He joined Airbnb out of high school, then the enterprise software company Hive. Early in 2020 that stopped feeling like enough.
He pulled in Holger Hjorth Thorup, a childhood friend and engineer, to build a COVID tracking app for Denmark. Through it he met people in biotech, spent several years investing in the field, and in 2021 started Invert with Thorup. Y Combinator took them in the Winter 2022 batch.
In 2023 Forbes put both founders on its 30 Under 30 Europe list for Manufacturing and Industry, describing a Copenhagen company that had raised more than $7 million in its first year from Y Combinator, Giant Ventures and ACME. Y Combinator now lists the company in San Francisco with a team of 25. The founder count is unsettled in the databases: Forbes names two, Crunchbase names three, Seedtable names four.
From file drops to an AI that writes Python
The early product was unglamorous and useful: connect to Sartorius, Thermo Fisher and Eppendorf hardware over OPC UA, OPC DA and file drops, join the readings to the right batch using the lab notebook, and map every vendor’s name for dissolved oxygen onto one canonical metric.
On October 28, 2025, Invert launched Invert Assist, a chat interface that runs bioprocess analysis and modeling from natural language prompts. It answers by writing and executing Python, so the code and the reasoning are visible to the user. The company says its internal evaluations score Assist more than twice as high as general purpose models on process optimization recommendations. Those evaluations are internal, and no outside party has published a check on them.
What is proven, and what is still claimed
| Evidence | What the record shows | Source type |
|---|---|---|
| Capital | Form D for Invert, Inc., CIK 0002029949, filed Jul 11, 2024. First sale Jun 25, 2024. Offered $21,699,989 in equity, sold $20,149,993 to 16 investors under Rule 506(b). Directors: Permin, Thorup, Sam Cates, Christian Tang-Jespersen. No later filing as of Sep 22, 2026. | Public record |
| Corporate | Delaware corporation, incorporated 2021, mail address in Dover, DE. Industry self classified on the filing as Other Technology. Revenue range: Decline to Disclose. | Public record |
| Security certification | SOC 2 Type II, audited by Prescient Assurance LLC against AICPA security criteria, and ISO/IEC 27001:2022 certification, both asserted on the company compliance page, which adds “Reports available on request.” No certificate or audit report is published. | Company-stated |
| Named customers | None, anywhere. The three case studies are titled “Top-5 Biopharma with Active Digital Twin Program,” “Global Top-10 Biopharma and Biologics CDMO” and “Clinical-Stage In Vivo Cell Therapy Company.” The index page that lists them promises “Real architectures, real numbers, named.” | Claim differs from the page |
| Product demonstrations | Several 2026 posts showcasing Invert Assist run on invented data, and say so: a study on a “simulated library of 2,486 metric definitions,” and a soft sensor study across 16 iPSC lots marked “Simulated demonstration data.” The free Assist trial is a sandbox of synthetic runs. | Company-stated |
| Quantified results | Per batch data preparation cut from 106 hours to 1.7 hours, report generation down 98 percent, deviation closure down 90 percent, up to $400,000 avoided. All from Invert’s own case studies about unnamed customers. | Company-stated |
| Federal record | No FDA 510(k) or PMA, no registered trial, no NIH or NSF award found for this company as of Sep 22, 2026. The one NIH hit on the name is a 1986 travel grant to the Society for Invertebrate Pathology. | Not found |
| Literature and patents | No peer reviewed paper and no granted patent found under the company or founder names. | Not found |
| Independent coverage | A 2023 Forbes list entry and a 2024 founder interview on the Data in Biotech podcast. The funding stories in search results are unbylined aggregator pages restating one number; no reported article on the round was found. | Independent |
| Headquarters | Y Combinator says San Francisco. Forbes called it Copenhagen based in 2023 and Tracxn still lists Copenhagen. The Form D gives a Dover, Delaware address. | Sources disagree |
Read plainly: the money and the corporate shell are documented, the security posture is asserted rather than shown, and every performance claim traces back to customers who will not put their names to it. That is normal for enterprise software sold into pharma, where reference logos are contractually hard to get. It is still the gap, and a page that advertises named case studies then anonymizes all three is making a promise it does not keep.
What to watch
- A second Form D. Nothing has been filed in the 27 months since the June 2024 first sale.
- The first named customer, or a customer speaking on the record about a deployment.
- Any outside evaluation of Invert Assist. The claim that it beats general purpose models by more than two times on process optimization rests entirely on internal tests.
- Whether the simulated demonstrations in the technical blog get replaced by results on real customer runs.
- Publication of the SOC 2 report or ISO certificate, or confirmation of either from a customer.
In their words
“I’d spent the last 10 years using bits and bytes to coordinate pixels on people’s screens and that in the face of an actual real world threat had actually almost nothing to contribute.”
Martin Tromp Permin, co-founder and CEO, Data in Biotech, 2024 · Interview
“Tongue in cheek we say that we want to increase the GDP of biology, which is a wink to the SAS company Stripe who talks about increasing the GDP of the internet.”
Martin Tromp Permin, Data in Biotech, 2024 · Interview
“It really is just a question of taking the schlep hours that highly educated, deeply smart, passionate scientists spend doing work that is below them and making computers do that for them, so they can go spend their time doing the actual science that they’re passionate about and that computers can’t yet do.”
Martin Tromp Permin, Data in Biotech, 2024 · Interview
“I don’t think it’s a good state of affairs to receive a PDF package of data after paying hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars for some CDMO service.”
Martin Tromp Permin, on tech transfer, 2024 · Interview
“That’s why we are confident in describing it as the first AI system that is purpose-built for bioprocess.”
Martin Tromp Permin, Invert Assist launch release, October 2025 · Company release
“We want to arm every single bioprocess engineer with their own on-demand data scientist that can help them analyze and model data they already have.”
Simon Sotak Gregor, senior software engineer, Invert, 2025 · Company
“We’d invested over two million dollars and six months of data science work into a digital twin that couldn’t run. Invert had us live in three days.”
Unnamed IT lead at a top global biopharma, Invert website, 2026 · Customer, unnamed
Related companies
Sources
- Public recordForm D, Invert, Inc., CIK 0002029949
- Public recordForm D, Invert Investment Group, LP (unrelated, same name)
- Public recordForm D, Invert Industries (unrelated, same name)
- Public recordFDA, ClinicalTrials.gov, NIH RePORTER, NSF and PubMed: no records
- IndependentInvert, 30 Under 30 Europe 2023
- InterviewBioprocessing Automation, Data in Biotech episode 30
- IndependentWhat Does Invert Do? Bioprocess data analytics
- IndependentInvert company profile and funding totals
- IndependentInvert company profile, team, funding and competitors
- IndependentInvert: funding, investors and team
- CompanyInvert launches Invert Assist
- CompanyEngineer blog: Invert Assist
- CompanyDigital Twin and CMC Biologics case studies
- CompanyProcess Development and MSAT Case Study
- CompanyCompliance page, blog index and pricing page
- CompanyInvert company profile
Profile researched and written by Healthcare Discovery. Last updated September 29, 2026.
