Recursion uses AI-powered models and large biological and chemical datasets to identify and design new therapies and to provide those models to partner drugmakers such as Roche and Bayer. The company says its datasets exceed 23,000 terabytes and grow by hundreds of terabytes every week, which it plans to use to train models on Nvidia's cloud platform. Recursion is conducting human trials for five drugs, with some data readouts expected next year, including programs for a neurovascular malformation and a type of ovarian cancer. The company recently acquired two AI-driven drug discovery firms in May for $87.5 million, reflecting a strengthened focus on AI. Recursion intends to use Nvidia's BioNeMo service to support its internal pipeline and partner programs. Following the Nvidia investment announcement, Recursion's stock jumped about 80%. Recursion builds an AI‑powered drug‑discovery platform that combines a proprietary database of cellular images with deep‑learning algorithms to identify therapeutic candidates. The company says it has doubled the number of clinical and preclinical programs in its pipeline and doubled the size of its cellular image database since its last financing. Its publicly listed pipeline includes 10 programs in Phase I and Phase II development spanning solid tumor cancers, C. difficile infection, lipid storage disorders and other indications. Recursion plans to use the new financing to support clinical development across its pipeline and to continue integrating new technologies throughout discovery. The company also announced a strategic partnership with Bayer to apply Recursion’s system to Bayer’s small‑molecule library for discovery in fibrotic diseases of the lung, kidney, heart and other organs. Financially, the company has completed a large Series D round and is pursuing both in‑house development and partner‑enabled programs tied to milestone payments. Recursion operates a machine learning‑enabled drug discovery platform that fuses high‑throughput automated biology, bioinformatics, and AI to identify treatments for diseases that can be modeled at the cellular level. The company is expanding its platform with new capabilities to accelerate new chemical entity chemistry and to predict safety pharmacology. Recursion plans to use recent financing to advance its pipeline of pre‑clinical and clinical assets, including clinical‑stage programs for cerebral cavernous malformation and neurofibromatosis type 2. While prioritizing treatments for rare diseases within its own pipeline, it will continue to sign partnerships with pharmaceutical companies across immuno‑oncology, oncology, aging, and inflammation. The company is led by CEO Chris Gibson and emphasizes massively parallel experimental and computational approaches to broaden indications beyond initial drug repurposing work. Recursion is headquartered in Salt Lake City, Utah. Recursion Pharmaceuticals combines artificial intelligence and automation to conduct experimental biology at scale, applying advanced machine learning to a dataset of more than one petabyte of biological images. The company uses these capabilities to discover new chemical entities, predict mechanisms of action, reveal previously undiscovered biology, and map compounds to diseases that can be modeled in human cells. Recursion is led by co-founder and CEO Chris Gibson, Ph.D. It raised a $20.5M credit facility to support continued growth initiatives. The financing was provided by Square 1 Bank, a division of Pacific Western Bank. Recursion is backed by investors including Lux Capital, Data Collective Venture Capital, Mubadala Investment Company, and Obvious Ventures. Recursion combines innovative biological science with artificial intelligence into a discovery platform it calls “Phenomics.” It models thousands of diseases in human cells and captures hundreds of millions of microscopic images to build a large annotated biological image dataset, which is growing by more than 2 million images and 20 TB of data each week. That dataset is used to train neural networks and other computational techniques to identify changes in thousands of cellular and subcellular features in response to perturbations. Recursion began with drug repurposing across models of rare genetic diseases and has expanded into target discovery, new chemical entity discovery, and new indication areas such as inflammation, immuno-oncology, infectious disease and aging, while also building out an internal pipeline and partnering with major pharmaceutical companies. The company has generated more than 30 discovery programs across more than two dozen diseases, and its lead program is expected to enter the clinic in 2018. Led by co-founder and CEO Chris Gibson and based in Salt Lake City, Recursion recently raised $60M in a Series B, bringing total capital raised to more than $80M.

Total raised

$497M

Funding rounds

7

Latest round

Equity

Latest activity

Jul 2023