The Venture Codex

Participated · Series C · Jul 2019

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.

Participated · Series C · Jul 2019

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.