AI Drug Discovery Startups Raise $526 Million in Two Days
Three AI drug discovery companies raised a combined $526 million on September 23 and 24. One mines plants and microbes for new medicines. One trains its models on what it calls the world's largest proprietary genomic dataset. The third runs an automated lab that makes and tests more than 2,000 molecules a week.
The largest check went to Enveda. The Boulder, Colorado-based company was founded in 2019 by Viswa Colluru, an early employee at Recursion Pharmaceuticals. Its premise is that powerful medicines can be found in nature rather than synthesized from scratch. Enveda uses AI to identify drug candidates in plants and microbes. On Wednesday it closed a $311 million Series E led by Catalio Capital Management, with participation from ICONIQ, T. Rowe Price, Lux Capital and others. The round values Enveda at $2 billion, double its valuation 12 months ago, and brings its total funding to more than $845 million.
The money will move Enveda's three clinical programs into later-stage trials and additional indications. ENV-294 is being developed for atopic dermatitis and asthma. ENV-308 is designed to help patients keep weight off after they stop taking GLP-1 drugs. The third candidate targets inflammatory bowel disease.
The same day, Basecamp Research closed a $140 million Series C. The London-based company has labs in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and builds AI models that design new therapies. Its foundation model, EDEN, is trained on the Trillion Gene Atlas. Basecamp launched the Atlas in March with Anthropic, NVIDIA, Ultima Genomics and PacBio. EDEN generates drug candidates such as peptides, enzymes, and cell and gene therapies.
S32 led the oversubscribed round. NVIDIA and Anthropic's Anthology Fund also invested, along with senior biopharma leaders including Roche Vice Chairman André Hoffmann. Basecamp will spend the money first on in vivo cell therapies, which modify a patient's cells inside the body. The company says EDEN can make these therapies easier to customize and deliver.
"The biotechnology revolution that began fifty years ago transformed how we make medicines. Personalized, AI-designed therapeutics represent the next transformation of that journey," Hoffmann said in a statement.
On Thursday, BigHat Biosciences announced a $75 million Series C. The San Mateo, California-based company designs protein therapeutics by pairing AI models with an automated wet lab. CEO Peyton Greenside told FirstWord that BigHat goes from computational design to experimental data in one week. In that time it produces and tests more than 2,000 molecules across more than 20 assays measuring developability, binding affinity and function. The results feed back into its models for the next round of designs. Greenside said standard industry timelines run four to six weeks and typically measure only a few properties for dozens or hundreds of molecules.
The approach has now produced a drug in patients. BHB810 is an antibody-drug conjugate directed at CDH17, and the first patient has been dosed in a Phase I study in gastric cancer and other advanced gastrointestinal tumors. BigHat says it is one of the first AI-designed biologics to reach humans. A second candidate, BHB299, is a T-cell engager targeting CEACAM6-expressing solid tumors. BigHat expects to begin human trials in 2027.
DFJ Growth and Premji Invest co-led BigHat's round. Existing investors Amgen Ventures, Eli Lilly and Merck's Global Health Innovation Fund also took part, and BigHat has collaborated with all three pharma companies. The round brings its total funding to $223 million.
Some investors appear in more than one of the three deals. Catalio led Enveda's financing and joined BigHat's round as a new investor. S32, formerly Section 32, led Basecamp's round and is an existing BigHat backer.
The rounds come in a year of large financings for AI-focused drug developers. In May, Alphabet-backed Isomorphic Labs closed a $2.1 billion Series B, the second-largest round in biotech history. BioSpace has tied the flow of tech and generalist money into biotech to an emerging class of AI-centric drugmakers. Tyrone Lam, chief business officer at GATC Health, described these companies as "building with computation at the core."
Topic: Biotech Ventures
