Rhino Raises $15M Series A for Federated Computing Platform

Four years ago, a groundbreaking study published in Nature Medicine proved something many thought impossible and that is AI models could be trained across multiple healthcare institutions without ever moving sensitive patient data between them. The EXAM study, a multi-institutional effort that demonstrated the real-world feasibility of Federated Learning in clinical environments, didn’t just advance medical AI and it sparked an entirely new computing paradigm.

Now, the company that emerged from those insights, Rhino Federated Computing, has closed an oversubscribed $15 million Series A funding round led by AlleyCorp, positioning itself as the leader in what it calls “Federated Computing.” The round included participation from LionBird, Fusion Fund, Arkin Digital Health, Qiming Venture Partners USA, TELUS Global Ventures, Wilson’s Bird Capital, and Keren Maccabi.

Beyond Federated Learning

While Federated Learning, which the ability to train AI models without centralizing data grabbed headlines in the healthcare world, Rhino’s founders realized they were onto something much bigger. The fundamental challenge wasn’t unique to medicine: across regulated industries like finance, pharmaceuticals, and healthcare, the world’s most valuable data remains siloed due to privacy regulations, cybersecurity concerns, and operational constraints.

“If the majority of the world’s data lives in regulated industries, and if those industries can’t centralize their data, then maybe it’s time to flip the paradigm entirely,” the company explained in announcing their funding milestone.

That insight led to the development of Federated Computing, a seamless, enterprise-grade computing layer that allows AI and analytics to run across distributed environments without moving data. Think of it as bringing the computation to the data, rather than the other way around.

Real-World Impact Across Industries

The platform has already gained traction with some of the world’s most security-conscious organizations. Rhino counts the majority of Newsweek’s top 20 digital hospitals among its clients, along with most of the top 10 global pharmaceutical companies and financial institutions that process transactions equivalent to the global GDP every few days.

The applications are as diverse as they are impactful. In biopharma, the FAITE Biopharma Consortium is using federated GenAI to accelerate drug development and protein design. Hospitals like Israel’s Sheba Medical Center are harmonizing data and collaborating on research without compromising control over sensitive patient information. In finance, institutions are fighting fraud through Swift’s Financial Fraud Prevention initiative, sharing AI models while keeping transaction data private.

An engineering executive at one of Rhino’s large technology partners captured the company’s broader ambition: “Rhino has a much bigger vision – Federated Learning is just a small (but important) part of it.”

Technical Milestones 

Rhino has crossed a significant technical threshold with over 100 active edge nodes connecting data centers, virtual private clouds, and secure environments worldwide. The platform, which began as a collaboration with NVIDIA, has evolved into a multi-cloud, hybrid system that integrates deeply into regulated enterprise IT ecosystems.

The architecture combines centralized orchestration with edge execution, enabling federated learning and analytics aggregation across previously incompatible systems. This approach has attracted support from leaders in AI and cloud infrastructure, who recognize the real-world constraints that prevent traditional data sharing approaches.

A Vision for Collaborative Future

With this funding round, Rhino becomes the most well-funded and mature Federated Computing company globally. The capital will fuel expansion across regulated industries, broaden their ecosystem of collaborators, and support new federated AI use cases while continuing investment in privacy-preserving, AI-native infrastructure.

The company’s vision extends beyond technical innovation to societal impact. Every meaningful federated use case they’ve encountered, according to the team, benefits society, whether it’s accelerating life-saving drug discovery, improving fraud detection, or enabling medical research that was previously impossible due to data sharing restrictions.

As organizations across industries grapple with the tension between AI innovation and data privacy, Rhino’s approach offers a compelling alternative: a federated future with “less friction, less waste, fewer middlemen, and more innovation where it counts.” For regulated industries sitting on vast troves of valuable but sensitive data, that future can’t come soon enough.