That deal underscores the immense amount of money that is being pumped into the AI drug discovery space - overall there have been billions put into startups in the field - but interestingly it also highlights something else. Just yesterday, Recursion - an AI-based drug discovery startup that has raised hundreds of millions of dollars in funding - announced its latest investment, a $50 injection from Nvidia that came with an important strategic partnership: Recursion would use Nvidia’s cloud platform to train its models on giant datasets. The immense inefficiency in the biomedical research system is the classic kind of big data problem that suits AI - which can not only crunch large, multifaceted calculations in real time, but be applied to read images to better understand results on cells and more - and that is one reason it’s been a popular field not just among AI startups, but investors, too.
“This gives us a real chance to accelerate and provide patient and societal benefits.”
Each of those drugs typically costs between $1 billion and $2 billion to develop, according to research from the National Institutes of Health in the U.S. “For each drug to make it to the market there are nine that failed,” said Kiachopoulos, working out to a 90% failure rate. Just as importantly, its platform - which enables faster modeling and computations based on different chemical permutations and how they work in different environments - aims to reduce the number of false starts and dead ends that characterize the process of drug discovery. Kiachopoulos estimated that the use of Causaly’s platform can reduce the 10-15 years that it might typically take to take an idea from target to the end of trials, down to around “several” years - a major reduction in the budget that needs to be dedicated to the process. These organizations use its cloud-based platform to work across the different stages that go into developing drugs: identifying interesting targets for research and development, determining biomarkers that are specific to those targets and aiding in pathophysiology to better understand a disease in order to determine what might be fixed with the right pharmaceuticals and other therapeutics. The company has now raised $93 million in total and is not disclosing valuation.Ĭausaly is just over six years old, and Yiannis Kiachopoulos, the CEO who co-founded the company with CTO Artur Saudabayev, said that it already works with 12 of the world’s biggest pharmaceutical companies and some of the biggest names in medical research, including Gilead, Novo Nordisk, Regeneron, the Food and Drug Administration and the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences. ICONIQ Growth - the growth-stage fund affiliated with the iconic investment firm of the same name - is leading the round, with previous backers Index Ventures, Marathon Venture Capital, EBRD, Pentech Ventures and Visionaries Club also participating.
#530M ICONIQ GROWTHHEARTECHCRUNCH SERIES#
Causaly, a London startup that has built an AI platform to help researchers accelerate the development and testing of drugs, has raised $60 million, a Series B that will be going toward R&D and to continue building out its team. Today, another hopeful in the space is announcing a funding round to expand its own contribution to the field.
Artificial intelligence has been a big theme in the world of health and medical research, and specifically in the area of drug discovery.
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