The growth in Artificial Intelligence (AI) has proliferated into various sectors. A lot of startups across the world are creating new approaches and seeking after the inventive business models in a bid to alter the pharmaceutical businesses.
London-based drug discovery company, LabGenius has announced today that it has raised over $10 million (€11.5 million) in its Series A financing round. LabGenius is a drug discovery company that is using artificial intelligence (AI), robotic automation, and synthetic biology to discover novel protein therapeutics.
The company has developed EVA – a robot scientist capable of designing, conducting, and learning from its own experiments. Importantly, the learning aspect means that EVA gets continuously smarter as it unpicks the genetic design rules that underpin life.
The Series A investment round was led by Lux Capital and Obvious Ventures, with participation from Felicis Ventures, Inovia Capital, Gigafund, Air Street Capital and existing investors. The round also included participation from Recursion Pharmaceuticals’ Founder & CEO Chris Gibson as well as Inovia Capital General Partner Patrick Pichette who was formerly Google’s CFO. Zavain Dar, Partner at Lux Capital and Nan Li, Managing Director at Obvious Ventures, will join the company’s board of directors.
LabGenius will use the capital to scale its team, expand the scope of its discovery platform, and initiate an internal asset development program. Through this internal asset development program, the company will evolve novel antibody fragments capable of treating conditions that cannot be addressed using conventional antibody formats.
LabGenius Founder and CEO, Dr. James Field, says
Protein therapeutics have an unparalleled potential to both treat disease and alleviate human suffering. By transforming how these drugs are discovered, we have a shot at improving the lives of countless people. Being able to robustly engineer novel therapeutic proteins has immense commercial and societal value. The discovery of protein therapeutics has historically been highly artisanal, relying heavily on humans for both experimental design and execution. This dependence has proved limiting because, as a species, we’re cognitively incapable of fully grasping the complexity of biological systems.
Zavain Dar, Partner at Lux Capital, said:
We’ve seen this playbook before. Bringing to bear multiple technologies to remove human bias from the pursuit of human health. We’re thrilled to co-lead the Series A with Obvious Ventures and back a truly bold vision with the potential for massive impact.
Nan Li, Managing Director at Obvious Ventures, said:
We have high conviction that computational approaches to protein engineering hold tremendous promise. After researching the space and meeting many companies, we believe that LabGenius is the clear breakout leader. We are beyond excited to co-lead the Series A and help the company realize their very ambitious vision to discover new protein therapies using AI.
— Press release
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