HONG KONG--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Today Deep Knowledge Ventures, a Hong Kong-based venture fund specializing in early and growth stage investments in Big Data and Life Sciences industries, announced the completion and execution of a milestone-based convertible bridge note agreement with Baltimore-based Insilico Medicine, Inc. The agreement was signed during the JP Morgan conference in San Francisco in mid-January and executed today. According to the terms of the agreement, Deep Knowledge Ventures will provide an $800 thousand convertible loan leading to at least $4 million in the next round of funding. This is conditional on Insilico Medicine achieving certain milestones in R&D and corporate development, including the validation of its drug repurposing capabilities and the establishment of a company office in Basel, Switzerland.
“Insilico Medicine is one of our flagship early investments that demonstrated phenomenal growth and research output over the past year. So we are ready to take the company to the next level,” said Dmitry Kaminsky, senior partner of Deep Knowledge Ventures. “While early engagements with large pharmaceutical companies indicate that Insilico’s technology is likely to result in a billion dollar business, we don’t want overwhelmingly positive emotions to prevail over logic. So we have agreed to make a small targeted investment that will enable the company to get their capabilities validated by third parties and to submit the vital papers demonstrating the performance of their drug repurposing algorithms. We also recognize Insilico’s need to have physical presence in Basel so they can keep closer contact with their Big Pharma partners with local support and management expertise.”
Deep Knowledge Ventures showcased Insilico Medicine along with its other portfolio companies during the JPMorgan conference in San Francisco in January and attracted significant interest from the various investor groups. In addition, on January 28th Insilico received the “Most Promising Company in Healthtech/IT” award at the PMWC2015 congress in Palo Alto, and was selected for the finals of the NVIDIA GPU Technology Challenge out of more than 150 technology companies.
For its next round of funding, which will be led by a large European venture capital firm and will include Deep Knowledge Ventures, Insilico Medicine must meet a number of milestones. First, Insilico must demonstrate its ability to conclusively repurpose one or more drugs using retrospective data in a double-blind validation experiment supervised by an impartial pharmaceutical company. Second, the company must also demonstrate its ability to efficiently compare gene expression data produced by different microarray and NGS platforms. Depending on the outcome of the independent validation, the company and its investors will decide on the size of the next round and the valuation of the company, which could be in the hundreds of millions of dollars.
“Our approach to aging research is built on a solid, sustainable business model designed to generate unique data, build exciting new products, incubate businesses and partner with top scientists while keeping the company afloat and ensuring organic growth,” said Alex Zhavoronkov, PhD, CEO of Insilico Medicine, Inc. “We are religiously dedicated to solving aging and delivering practical solutions within the next two years, but we want to start by helping pharmaceutical companies revive their pipelines and use our technology to improve R&D performance. Over the past two years we have managed to achieve a lot with very little, growing the global team to over thirty people while putting in the overtime to build a sustainable platform, where risk is minimized. Now we are at a point where we can confidently accept outside investment to expand our global operations and we thank Deep Knowledge Ventures and their partners for their support.”
About Deep Knowledge Ventures
Deep Knowledge Ventures is a Hong Kong-based venture fund management company focused on deploying machine learning to accelerate progress in high-impact fields. DKV’s investment portfolio spans biotechnology, regenerative medicine, oncology, drug discovery, bioinformatics and personalized medicine. For more information, please visit http://www.deepknowledgeventures.com
About Insilico Medicine
Insilico Medicine, Inc. is a Baltimore-based company utilizing advances in genomics and big data analysis for in silico drug discovery and drug repurposing for aging and age-related diseases. The company utilizes the GeroScope™, OncoFinder™ , Pathway Cloud Intelligence™ and PharmAtlas™ packages for aging and cancer research, pursues internal drug discovery programs, and provides services to pharmaceutical companies. For more information on Insilico Medicine, please visit http://www.insilicomedicine.com.
