The German-American Entrepreneurial Journey of Eike Gerhardt, Co-Founder of Autopoiesis Science

Explain your business model (what is the problem you are solving)

At Autopoiesis, we’re creating Aristotle, the world’s leading AI scientist. Imagine if an AI could help solve aging, cure diseases, or provide precise answers to complex questions. Popular tools like ChatGPT have not achieved this, and we believe they won’t in their current form.The problem is simple: most AI systems are great at sounding right, but often aren’t. They predict the next word based on their training data, without truly “thinking” through whether their answers make sense. That might be fine for gym plans or travel tips, but in science and medicine, where lives are at stake, wrong answers can have fatal consequences.

Aristotle works differently. Inspired by the mindset of real scientists, it questions its own answers, assumes nothing is certain, and applies systematic skepticism to reach the most likely conclusion. If it doesn’t know, it says so, offering confidence scores and alternative paths, rather than pretending.

This approach has made Aristotle the best-performing system in the world for scientific reasoning, outperforming OpenAI GPT-5 ($300 billion), Google Gemini 2.5 Pro, Grok 3 Beta ($80 billion), and Claude Sonnet 4 ($60 billion) on scientific reasoning benchmarks (industry-standard tests measuring AI accuracy on scientific questions).

What we have built is not another GPT wrapper. It is a novel, purpose-built architecture designed for one mission: help the world’s top scientists make breakthroughs that change lives, from finding cures for incurable diseases to pushing the boundaries of human knowledge.

World-class investors backed us because we created something the world needs more than anything: the first AI system scientists can trust.

Tell us about your personal story

The reason why I co-founded Autopoiesis is quite personal. When I was 12 years old, my father died of cancer. In the same year, my mother was diagnosed with cancer as well, with only a 50% chance of survival. I came frighteningly close to being an orphan.

It took me a long time to recover but also ignited an ever-lasting wish to help people who suffered the same way I did. Over the years, I tried to contribute in ways that could help others in similar situations. I transported stem cells internationally for patients with leukemia and worked at “Förderverein für krebskranke Kinder,” an organization in Tübingen, where I did my PhD, that supports parents of children with cancer. I believe I was able to make a difference for some, but it always felt like it wasn’t enough.

When I met my founding partners, Joseph Reth (ex-DARPA and visionary computer scientist) and Larry Callahan, PhD (a distinguished ex-FDA chemist and scientific leader), I knew that this was my chance to have an impact on a much larger scale. My chance to help prevent suffering for millions of families.

I know that it is too late for my father, but not for many others. That is why I am fully committed to this mission and will give it everything I have.

⁠You are currently seeking funding. How can we invest? Why should we?

We closed our pre-seed round in July 2025. GABA’s network was instrumental in quickly connecting us with relevant contacts in Silicon Valley, helping to facilitate our funding discussions. After our announcement post with our benchmark scores GPQA Diamond (92.4%) and SimpleQA (96.1%) went viral on X, we received a lot of commercial interest. Many people in health and pharma understood that a self-critical and self-learning model like Aristotle can become the reasoning infrastructure for many critical workflows in the health sector.

Therefore, we decided to extend our pre-seed to scale faster and enter commercialization earlier than anticipated. Tickets above $50k will get the chance to invest via a SAFE as individual investors. For smaller tickets, we’ll offer an opportunity to invest via an SPV.

In the near future, Autopoiesis Sciences might become the most impactful company ever built. We are looking forward to partnering with mission-aligned investors who want to accelerate scientific discovery and save millions of lives as urgently as we do.