SALT LAKE CITY--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Recursion Pharmaceuticals today announced the close of an additional $2.15M in funding, bringing its Series A round to a total of $15.05M for drug discovery at the intersection of biology and artificial intelligence. The additional funding came from several high impact individual investors and Felicis Ventures, joining the original close led by deep technology investor Lux Capital, with participation from Obvious Ventures, Epic Ventures, Data Collective, AME Cloud Ventures, Wild Basin Investments, and several prominent angel investors. These additional funds will hasten the development of “Platform 2.0,” an innovative marriage of biology and artificial intelligence that will enable the discovery of drugs for any disease that can be modeled in human cells at an unprecedented pace.
“We are proud to join Recursion’s Series A round,” said Sundeep Peechu of Felicis Ventures. “Recursion’s technology has the potential to radically accelerate drug discovery. We are excited for this revolution in biotech - one in which drug discovery can happen 10 times cheaper and faster than ever before.”
In addition to its disruptive platform, Recursion’s early focus on drug repurposing makes it possible to rapidly and cheaply translate discoveries into the clinic. Both its technology and business strategy make Recursion attractive to big pharma partners, attested to by three existing partnerships.
“The enthusiasm we’ve experienced from investors and big pharma partners speaks to the opportunity presented by our company. Through our use of high-throughput biology, big data, and artificial intelligence, we make it easier than ever for pharma partners to reposition their high-value assets,” said Chris Gibson, Ph.D., CEO of Recursion. “In addition to furthering our ability to find drugs to treat rare diseases, this additional funding will help us extend our drug and target discovery technology into new indication areas, such as aging, inflammation, infectious disease, oncology and diagnostics.”
Recursion has now raised more than $19 million in equity capital since inception.
About Recursion Pharmaceuticals, LLC
Recursion Pharmaceuticals, LLC, is a Salt Lake City-based drug discovery company founded in 2013 based on technology developed at the University of Utah. Recursion uses a novel drug screening platform to efficiently reposition known drugs and shelved pharmaceutical assets to treat rare genetic diseases and other conditions. The company’s original focus on rare genetic diseases is much-needed, as there are more than 5,000 such conditions that together affect millions of Americans, and more than 95 percent of these diseases have no approved therapy. Recursion’s novel drug screening platform combines experimental biology and bioinformatics in a massively parallel system to quickly and efficiently identify treatments for multiple rare genetic diseases, or any disease that can be modeled at the cellular level. The core of the approach revolves around high-throughput automated screening using high-content assays in human cells, which allows the near simultaneous modeling of hundreds of genetic and other diseases. Rich data from these assays is probed using advanced statistical and machine learning approaches, and the effects of thousands of known drugs, shelved drug candidates, and novel chemical matter can be investigated efficiently to identify those holding the most promise for the treatment of disease. Learn more at www.recursionpharma.com, or connect with us on Twitter @RecursionPharma, Facebook www.facebook.com/RecursionPharma/, and LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/company/recursion-pharmaceuticals.
About Felicis Ventures
Founded in 2006, Felicis Ventures is a boutique venture capital firm. Felicis invests in iconic companies reinventing core markets (Credit Karma, Adyen, Greenhouse), as well as those creating frontier technologies (Vicarious, Matterport, Pindrop Security). More than 60 Felicis portfolio companies have been acquired or gone public, including Fitbit (IPO), Shopify (IPO), Meraki (acquired by Cisco), Twitch (acquired by Amazon), and Dropcam (acquired by Google). To learn more, please visit www.felicis.com.
