Nebius, the AI cloud company, has announced the winners of the AI Discovery Awards, its annual showcase of startups using AI to deliver advances in healthcare and life sciences.
The 2026 programme added Medical Devices and Medical Imaging to the existing BioPharma, Genomics, and Digital Health tracks, reflecting the growing role of AI in connected medical equipment and diagnostic imaging, where inference-intensive workloads are beginning to reshape clinical practice.
The first-place winners were Phylo in Biopharma, Corti.ai in Digital Health, Omniscope in Genomics, Real Time Imaging Systems in Medical Devices, and Nucleo Research in Medical Imaging.
Second-place winners were Virgo, VitVio, Twig Bio, BAIBYS Fertility and Subtle Medical, while third-place winners were Decoy Therapeutics, EverEx, DELFI Diagnostics, Fluent and Hertility Health.
Dr. Ilya Burkov, Global Head of Healthcare & Life Sciences at Nebius, said: “Our winners – and indeed all of the 647 submissions we reviewed – reflect how rapidly AI is changing the pace of healthcare research. Across all categories, startups are compressing timelines that once took years into months or even weeks, and bringing capabilities to clinical and laboratory settings that simply did not exist before. The AI Discovery Awards exist to accelerate that momentum, and to connect the most promising teams with the compute resources, investor networks, and mentorship they need to move from promising research to bringing products to market.”
Alongside the awards programme, Nebius previewed the Nebius Scientific AI and Healthcare Platform, AI infrastructure built to meet the specialist needs of healthcare and life sciences organisations. Developed in collaboration with teams from biotech, pharma, digital health, academia and research institutions, the platform is built around two primary use cases.
The first is private model hosting, which gives biotech and pharmaceutical organisations the ability to securely host proprietary models without dedicated GPU overhead. The second is “Bring your Own Job”, which supports custom, reproducible scientific workflows that researchers may prefer over standard inference endpoints.
Now in their second year, the AI Discovery Awards are part of Nebius’s broader commitment to supporting startups and enterprises developing AI applications in healthcare and life sciences. Previous winners have included Transcripta Bio, Slingshot AI, Converge Bio and Prima Mente. This year’s awards ceremony was held at Town Hall by Bottaccio, London.
The 2026 AI Discovery Awards were open to companies from pre-seed through to Series D that put AI and machine learning at the core of their product. Category winners were selected from 647 applications received from around the world by an independent panel of 28 judges representing pharmaceutical companies, academic institutions and venture capital firms.
Submissions were evaluated based on the use of AI within the product, use of compute, technical innovation, functionality and advantages, performance and efficiency, global impact, and market potential and business sustainability.
Category winners each received $100,000 in compute and inference credits, with second and third place receiving $50,000 and $30,000, respectively, in compute credits.
Regional Trailblazer awards recognising companies advancing AI in healthcare and life sciences globally were also awarded for the first time. Winners each received $30,000 in compute credits. The winners were Check Me for Africa, Hummingbird Bioscience for APAC, Owkin for EMEA, Arkangel AI for Latin America, and Xaira Therapeutics for North America.
