SAN FRANCISCO--(BUSINESS WIRE)--VeriSIM Life (VeriSIM) www.verisimlife.com, the leading artificial intelligence (AI)-enabled, unique R&D decisions de-risker for breakthrough drug development, today announced it has closed its oversubscribed $15 million Series A round. The financing was led by Morpheus Ventures. Additional new investors include Debiopharm Innovation Fund and Colorcon Ventures, with continued support from existing investors OCA Ventures, Intel Capital, Serra Ventures and Susa Ventures.
This investment strengthens VeriSIM’s continued growth trajectory by helping scale its operations, democratize its 'virtual drug development engine' BIOiSIM, fast-track its sales and marketing efforts and continue work on transformational partnerships with industry and academia.
VeriSIM’s BIOiSIM platform, driven by artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML), de-risks R&D decisions by providing meaningful insights much earlier in the drug development process with unprecedented accuracy and scalability. More than 90% of drugs tested in animals fail to pass human clinical trials, resulting in delayed development and high costs. VeriSIM’s platform solves this decades-old translatability problem within the drug development phase and ensures clinical success of drugs intended for highly unmet needs. With its first-in-class platform, VeriSIM is transforming the way pharmaceutical and biotech companies address the most challenging diseases impacting humankind.
“We are excited to partner with these strategic investor groups to expand our platform so pharma/biotech companies can make more informed decisions on investigational drugs,” said Dr. Jo Varshney, founder and CEO of VeriSIM Life. “This new funding will allow us to accelerate our growth and bring the future of more efficient, cost-effective clinical trials to life. Our goal is to make VeriSIM the gold standard in addressing the translational gap in the industry.”
BIOiSIM is uniquely positioned to launch preclinical programs and secure clinical successes in an unparalleled way, rarely seen in the industry. With an intense focus on building the infrastructure to generate stacks of unbiased models and validation, VeriSIM has emerged as a leader in helping to develop life-saving therapies.
Morpheus Ventures’ partner, Damien Petty, said, “VeriSIM has surpassed customer expectations in delivering better, faster and more comprehensive development decisions. We have long believed in the disruptive potential of applying AI/ML to challenging problems. While others have made progress applying AI to fixing the drug discovery process, the long and costly post-discovery development phase has been largely overlooked. VeriSIM is unique in applying physics-based AI/ML models to disrupting the drug development phase to achieve significant results for its customers and partners.” Petty led Morpheus’ investments in Vicarious, Rigetti Computing, Ten63 Therapeutics, and Starship Technologies.
“Our decision to invest in VeriSIM Life is largely due to the validated ability of their BIOiSIM platform to reduce time, costs and risks associated with drug development,” said Tanja Dowe, CEO of the Debiopharm Innovation Fund. “The value of using this AI-based platform to decrease the number of outsourced preclinical experiments offers substantial benefit to pharmaceutical researchers, allowing them to narrow down the selection of early-stage drug compounds more efficiently and focus on developing treatments that are most likely to help patients overcome their disease.”
VeriSIM Life was founded in 2017 by Dr. Jo Varshney, DVM and PhD, alongside a truly cross-functional team of pharmaceutical scientists, software engineers and AI/ML and simulation experts.
For more information about VeriSIM Life follow them on Twitter at @VeriSIMlife and visit: www.verisimlife.com or email press@verisimlife.com.
About Morpheus Ventures
Founded in 2016, Morpheus invests in the disruption of large markets across the technology landscape from consumer to enterprise technologies including data analytics, machine learning, robotics, transportation and SaaS. The firm is headquartered in Los Angeles and backs great entrepreneurs worldwide. For more information, see www.morpheus.com.
About VeriSIM Life
VeriSIM Life has developed a sophisticated computational platform that leverages advanced AI and ML techniques to significantly improve drug discovery and development by greatly reducing the time and money it takes to bring a drug to market. BIOiSIM is a first-in-class 'virtual drug development engine' that offers unprecedented value for the drug development industry by narrowing down the number of drug compounds that offer anticipated value for the treatment or cure of specific illnesses or diseases. The program not only reduces the time and cost of drug discovery and development, it also greatly reduces the need for animal testing that, in the vast majority of cases, does not translate to humans (over 90% of drugs that are currently tested in animals fail to pass human clinical trials). For more information visit: www.verisimlife.com.
