Enveda Biosciences: Drug Discovery Company Raises $119 Million

By Noah Long • Apr 28, 2023

Enveda Biosciences announced that it had closed an additional $51 million equity financing to add to the $68 million Series B announced in December 2022. And Kinnevik led the Series B1 round, which also included participation by new investor Henry R. Kravis, the Co-Founder and Co-Executive Chairman of KKR.

This funding round included strong participation from Enveda’s current major investors, which included FPV, True Ventures, Dimension, and Wireframe. And the Series B1 round brings the total capital that Enveda has raised to $175 million.

Enveda is essentially a drug discovery and development company utilizing AI-powered technologies to uncover the ancient cache of medicines present in plants. And the company’s proprietary platform solves the long-standing obstacles in natural product drug development like active molecule identification, property and structure prioritization, amenability to medicinal chemistry, and large-scale material access.

This additional funding will enable Enveda to progress multiple platform-derived molecules to the clinic this year and next year across inflammation, fibrosis, and neurosensory indications.

KEY QUOTES:

“We are thrilled that the development of our platform and the strength of our pipeline continues to attract great investors even in a difficult market. Our investors are leaders in biotech and technology investing, providing the capital to pursue ambitious growth across pipeline and platform. We are poised to advance multiple programs toward clinical development and redefine success in natural product drug discovery.”

— Viswa Colluru, Ph.D., founder and CEO of Enveda

“Even though nature’s chemistry has given us many of today’s blockbusters, technical bottlenecks have hampered its use in modern drug discovery. Enveda’s use of large language models, metabolomics, and robotics to search nature’s chemical space unlocks one of the most validated approaches to drug discovery. Enveda is a shoo-in to our life sciences strategy of bringing the technological revolution to the pharma industry.”

—Christian Scherrer, Investment Director at Kinnevik; Christian will be joining Enveda’s board of directors as an observer.

“Enveda’s pace in terms of pipeline and their ability to execute has continued to impress us since joining last year. We are incredibly excited to double down on Enveda’s mission and team.”

— Pegah Ebrahimi, co-founder and Managing Partner of FPV; Pegah will be joining Enveda’s board of directors in connection with this financing.

“We are excited to develop a versatile clinical strategy across a portfolio of chronic inflammatory and fibrotic diseases, quickly advancing assets to clinical proof-of-concept. We are leveraging Enveda’s unique computational strengths to link compound mechanisms to biomarker strategies, further maximizing the potential clinical success of these programs.”

— Mark Deeg, M.D., Ph.D., Chief Medical Officer of Enveda