- insitro, a machine-learning driven drug discovery and development company, announced it raised $143 million in an oversubscribed Series B financing
insitro — a machine-learning driven drug discovery and development company — announced it has raised $143 million in an oversubscribed Series B financing. This round of funding was led by Andreessen Horowitz with participation from new investors Canada Pension Plan Investment Board (CPP Investments) and funds and accounts advised by T. Rowe Price Associates as well as funds managed by BlackRock, Casdin Capital, HOF Capital, WuXi AppTec’s Corporate Venture Fund, and other undisclosed investors. And current investors ARCH Venture Partners, Foresite Capital, GV, Third Rock Ventures, Two Sigma Ventures, and Alexandria Venture Investments also participated in the financing. In connection with the funding, Vijay Pande, Ph.D., general partner at Andreessen Horowitz, has been appointed to the board of directors.
At Andreessen Horowitz, Dr. Pande focuses on investments in biopharma and healthcare. And previously, Dr. Pande was the Henry Dreyfus Professor of chemistry and professor of structural biology and of computer science at Stanford University where he remains an adjunct professor and was also the creator of the Folding@Home Distributed Computing Project. Plus he is also the co-founder of Globavir Biosciences where he translated his research advances into a startup that aimed to discover cures for Dengue Fever and Ebola.
The proceeds from the funding will be used for continuing to build insitro’s foundations of technology and automation thus enabling data generation at larger scale and further expanding the capabilities to generate predictive models of human disease. And the capital will be used for prosecuting newly identified, genetically validated targets, to identify patient segmentation biomarkers, and to advance therapeutics in genetically-defined patient populations. And insitro also plans to establish new industry partnerships and build additional ML-enabled capabilities along the R&D value chain in order to accelerate drug discovery and development.
Key Quotes:
“Since our founding, insitro has been focused on building a data-driven drug discovery and development company. We have spent the last two years advancing several critical components of our business. First, we have assembled a world class team of computational scientists and engineers, biologists and translational scientists, drug developers and company builders, all uniquely working in true partnership. Second, we have built a powerful platform for producing disease-relevant biological data at scale. Finally, we have made important scientific progress on the development of ML-driven disease models that can predict human clinical outcomes and on the application of these models to our first two therapeutic areas in liver and CNS disease. With this financing, as well as milestones we have achieved through our strategic partnership with Gilead, we are in a strong position to continue executing on our vision.”
-Daphne Koller, Ph.D., founder and chief executive officer of insitro
“In the two years since its inception, insitro has already emerged as a leader in bridging between data science and engineering to transform the landscape of drug discovery,” said Dr. Pande. “They are developing novel approaches that combine tools from cell biology, bioengineering, and data science to generate data at the quality and scale required to apply and expand the power of machine learning. I am excited to work with this incredible team as we realize the next generation of drug discovery and development.”
-Dr. Vijay Pande, Ph.D., general partner at Andreessen Horowitz
