Recursion Pharmaceuticals announced its $12.9 million Series A round of funding, led by leading deep technology investor Lux Capital, with participation from Obvious Ventures, Epic Ventures, Data Collective, AME Cloud Ventures, Wild Basin Investments, and several prominent angel investors.
Recursion has built a proprietary drug discovery platform that combines the best elements of high-throughput biology and automation with the newest advances in Artificial Intelligence (AI). The company has already identified novel uses for known drugs, bioactive compounds, and shelved pharma assets in the space of rare genetic disease. With its Series A funding, Recursion will develop it’s next-generation “Platform 2.0” – to scale its endeavor from the exploration of dozens of targets and diseases per year to thousands.
“Recursion’s platform is exactly the revolutionary and intersectional technology we look for at Lux,” said Zavain Dar of Lux Capital. “We look to back exceptional founders with futuristic ideas that challenge and change the status quo. This is one of those teams and ideas – leveraging AI in biotech to remove human bias and make drugs cheaper, faster, and better than before.”
Recursion’s early focus includes drug repurposing and repositioning, a strategy which leverages existing safety and efficacy data to translate discoveries into the clinic more rapidly (and at lower cost) than building drugs from scratch. This strategy is attractive to big pharma, as evidenced by Recursion’s current partnerships with three of the top 10 largest pharmaceutical companies.
“Our business model embraces partnership. We help our pharma partners identify new uses of their proprietary, high-value molecules,” said Chris Gibson, PhD, CEO of Recursion, “Combine that strategy with our big data skills and high-throughput biology expertise, and you have the potential to identify therapeutic agents for many diseases at a fraction of the cost. This is especially compelling in the area of rare disorders, which together affect 10% of our population, but the vast majority of which have no treatment.”
“We believe that Recursion’s technology holds tremendous opportunity to catalyze the discovery of new solutions to rare diseases, and that is the type of grand mission and change that we look for at Obvious Ventures,” said Nan Li, Principal of Obvious Ventures.
Rare disease isn’t the only area in which Recursion’s approach shows promise. The Series A funding announcement closely follows the award of a grant from the National Institutes of Health to apply Recursion’s platform to diseases of aging. The company is also exploring both internal projects and partnerships in inflammation, infectious disease, oncology and diagnostics.
“The beauty of our platform is that it is flexible enough to apply to any disease that can be modeled in human cells,” said Blake Borgeson, PhD, Co-Founder and Chief Technology Officer of Recursion.
“This funding is a vote of confidence in our success to date and will help drive far larger accomplishments to come, and we’re proud of that,” remarked Dean Li, MD, PhD, Co-Founder of Recursion and CSO for University of Utah Health Sciences. Recursion has now raised more than $17 million in equity capital since inception.
About Recursion Pharmaceuticals, LLC
Recursion Pharmaceuticals, LLC, is a Salt Lake City-based drug discovery company founded in 2013 based on technology developed at the University of Utah. Recursion uses a novel drug screening platform to efficiently reposition known drugs and shelved pharmaceutical assets to treat rare genetic diseases and other conditions. The company’s original focus on rare genetic diseases is much-needed, as there are more than 5,000 such conditions that together affect millions of Americans, and more than 95 percent of these diseases have no approved therapy. Recursion’s novel drug screening platform combines experimental biology and bioinformatics in a massively parallel system to quickly and efficiently identify treatments for multiple rare genetic diseases, or any disease that can be modeled at the cellular level. The core of the approach revolves around high-throughput automated screening using high-content assays in human cells, which allows the near simultaneous modeling of hundreds of genetic and other diseases. Rich data from these assays is probed using advanced statistical and machine learning approaches, and the effects of thousands of known drugs, shelved drug candidates, and novel chemical matter can be investigated efficiently to identify those holding the most promise for the treatment of disease. Learn more at www.recursionpharma.com
About Lux Capita
Lux Capital is a venture firm based in New York City and Silicon Valley investing in counter-conventional, seed and early stage science and technology ventures. The firm manages $700 million in assets across four funds. For more information, please see www.luxcapital.com. Follow Lux on Twitter @Lux_Capital
About Obvious Ventures
Based in San Francisco, CA, Obvious Ventures is an early stage venture capital firm focused on world-positive startups across sustainable systems, healthy living, and people power. Evan Williams, co-founder of Blogger, Twitter and Medium, helped form Obvious Ventures in early 2014. More information is available at www.obvious.com
Contact: Recursion Pharmaceuticals, LLC
Chris Gibson, CEO
Phone: (801) 587-1629
Email: chris.gibson@recursionpharma.com
