Recursion operates the Recursion OS platform, which provides drug manufacturers access to large biological and chemical datasets for designing and developing therapeutics. The company says its datasets exceed 23,000 terabytes and uses AI to train models for drug discovery. Recursion is currently running human trials for five drugs, including a mid-stage candidate targeting a neurovascular disease caused by small‑vessel malformations. It collaborates with major pharma partners such as Bayer and Roche and lists AI pioneer Yoshua Bengio among its advisers. Earlier this year Recursion agreed to acquire two AI-driven drug‑discovery companies for $87.5 million. The company went public two years ago. Recursion is a biopharma company mapping and navigating biology and chemistry with the goal of bringing better medicines to patients faster and at lower cost. It leverages sophisticated machine‑learning algorithms to analyze a collection of trillions of searchable relationships across biology and chemistry. With massive experimental and computational scale, Recursion unites technology, biology and chemistry to advance the future of medicine. The company aims to address declining productivity in drug discovery and development, reducing costs and improving efficiency to meet unmet patient needs. Recursion recently completed a $150 million private placement led by Kinnevik, which signals fresh capital and strategic backing for its platform. Kinnevik said it expects to be a long‑term partner as Recursion continues to decode biology to radically improve lives. Recursion has built an advanced ultra-high-throughput wet-lab and machine-learning platform to generate proprietary, high-dimensional, multi-modal datasets of human cellular biology at massive scale. The company applies advanced machine learning to reveal novel biological relationships and accelerate target discovery, digital chemistry, predictive ADME/T and the digitization of in vivo studies. Recursion intends to use the new funds to advance the clinical development of its therapeutic pipeline and continue investing in its proprietary technology. Leadership is led by co-founder and CEO Chris Gibson, PhD. The company announced a strategic collaboration with Bayer to identify and develop novel treatments for fibrotic diseases across multiple organs. The collaboration contemplates more than ten fibrosis programs and includes upfront and potential milestone and royalty payments tied to development and commercialization. Recursion combines automated experimental biology and machine learning to discover drug candidates by applying causative perturbations to human cells and analyzing large biological-image datasets generated on its robotics platform. The company says its in-house database exceeds two petabytes of biological images, enabling ML approaches to reveal candidates, mechanisms of action, and potential toxicity. Recursion plans to continue building out its machine-learning-enabled drug discovery platform and add capabilities to accelerate new chemical entity chemistry and predict safety pharmacology. It will advance a growing pipeline of preclinical and clinical assets, including clinical-stage programs for cerebral cavernous malformation and neurofibromatosis type 2, while prioritizing treatments for rare diseases. Recursion also intends to continue partnerships with pharma across immuno-oncology, oncology, aging, and inflammation. The company is headquartered in Salt Lake City and reports rapid operational growth, including expanding automated experimental bandwidth, increasing headcount, and opening a 100,000 square-foot headquarters. Recursion applies machine learning to high-content cellular imaging to rapidly identify promising drug compounds across many diseases. The company began in 2014 with a goal to identify 100 new treatments in 10 years and says it sifts through chemical combinations for an average of eight diseases per week. Its core product is a data-driven discovery platform that turns biology into a data science problem and that company leadership says it owns outright. Recursion’s approach reduces early-stage trial-and-error by predicting which compounds will work without lengthy initial disease-specific studies. The startup still must move identified compounds through clinical trials, and it competes with larger drug makers in a capital-intensive industry. Financially, Recursion has been funded by multiple venture investors and has raised substantive venture capital to scale its platform.

Total raised

$620M

Funding rounds

5

Latest round

Equity

Latest activity

Jul 2023