Inductive Bio, a company democratizing AI models to transform small molecule drug discovery, announced that it has raised $25 million in Series A funding led by Obvious Ventures with participation from Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) Bio + Health, Lux Capital, S32, Character, and Amino Collective, alongside angel investors including Oren Etzioni, Jeff Hammerbacher, Malay Gandhi, and Jakob Uszkoreit.
Value proposition: This funding comes at an inflection point for the pharmaceutical industry as it faces pressure on multiple fronts: increasingly scarce early-stage funding, growing competition from Chinese biotech companies, and a traditional drug discovery process that remains inefficient and expensive. And one of the biggest bottlenecks in the preclinical drug discovery process is the enormous amount of time and money needed to balance a drug’s potency with the critical properties of absorption, distribution, metabolism, excretion, and toxicity (ADMET).
Inductive’s approach centers around its pre-competitive data consortium, where multiple companies contribute to anonymized data in a secure IP-protected environment, creating a foundational dataset that enables AI models to learn from thousands of real-world drug discovery programs. The resulting insights enhance Inductive’s Compass platform, which predicts a drug’s ADMET properties before a molecule is synthesized, guiding chemists towards molecules with the highest likelihood of success.
Since launching a year ago, Inductive’s Compass software has scaled to support dozens of active small-molecule drug programs across diverse therapeutic areas. And medicinal chemists have already explored 1+ million molecule designs in the platform. In a recent collaboration with Nested Therapeutics, Inductive’s platform helped efficiently resolve permeability and metabolic stability issues, contributing to the nomination of a drug development candidate with excellent cell potency and cross-species pharmacokinetics.
Polaris ADMET competition: This funding announcement follows the company’s first-place finish in the inaugural Polaris ADMET competition. This competition evaluated AI models in a blinded, open challenge using a recently disclosed Coronavirus Main Protease drug program. Inductive’s Beacon-1 model placed first among 38 other competitors from leading AI drug discovery companies and academic groups.
What the funding will be used for: Inductive will utilize the funding to expand its AI model R&D, grow its pre-competitive data consortium and deploy its technology industry-wide, leveling the playing field for both innovative startups and large pharmaceutical companies. And longer-term, Inductive aims to launch an AI-native contract research organization (CRO) on top of this technology.
KEY QUOTES:
“Designing compounds with optimal ADMET properties is a fundamental challenge in drug discovery. This is where predictive AI tools can have a real impact. By accurately predicting ADMET properties in real time, Inductive’s platform helps our chemistry team design higher-quality compounds before investing resources in complex synthesis.”
Brock Shireman, SVP of small molecule drug discovery at Rapport Therapeutics
“In a tough funding environment and an increasingly competitive market, the rapid discovery of high-quality clinical candidates has never been more important for biopharma companies. Traditional approaches for optimizing drug molecules are like playing a complex game of ‘whack-a-mole’ with dramatic consequences for the success or failure of a therapeutic program. Our platform’s pre-competitive consortium allows the entire industry to benefit from the rapid advances being made in AI, dramatically accelerating the path to life-changing therapies that will benefit patients for centuries to come.”
Josh Haimson, co-founder and CEO of Inductive Bio
“What impressed us about Inductive is that they’ve moved beyond the hype of AI in drug discovery to deliver measurable results that are already changing how drugs are developed. At Obvious, we believe AI is ushering in a new scientific method, accelerating innovation across fields like biotechnology and healthcare. Inductive embodies this shift, showing how these approaches can drive real-world breakthroughs that have the potential to fundamentally transform the economics and pace of drug development.”
Rohan Ganesh, Partner at Obvious Ventures
