Eric Durand is Co-Founder and Chief Scientific Officer at Rivercell, a Paris-based AI biotech company building a proprietary data platform and AI Virtual Cell model to predict how human cells respond to drugs and genetic changes.

Eric holds a PhD in Applied Statistics and Population Genetics from Grenoble INP and conducted postdoctoral research at UC Berkeley, before building one of the first consumer ancestry algorithms at 23andMe.

Eric spent seven years as Director of Oncology Data Science at Novartis, supporting around 300 drug programs, and later grew Owkin's AI team from 20 to over 100 engineers as Chief Data Science Officer.

Prior to Rivercell, Eric co-founded Bioptimus, a biology foundation-model company that raised $76 million, establishing him as a serial founder at the frontier of AI and life sciences.

Rivercell launched from stealth in October 2026 with a $25M seed round led by HV Capital, with the mission to reduce physical drug-discovery experiments by training AI world models on large-scale, time-resolved single-cell data.