AI-Powered Drug Discovery Firm Insitro Secures $400 Million in Series C Funding

Large-Scale Financing Again in the AI-Assisted Drug Discovery Field.

Recently, Insitro, an AI-driven drug discovery company, announced it has raised $400 million in Series C financing., to advance its development efforts and partnerships with large pharmaceutical companies such as Gilead and BMS.

This round of financing was led by the Canada Pension Plan Investment Board (also known as CPP Investments) and received support from dozens of institutions, including Andreessen Horowitz, Casdin Capital, ARCH Venture Partners, Foresite Capital, GV, Third Rock Ventures, Two Sigma Ventures, and HOF Capital. Notably, Temasek and SoftBank also joined this round of financing.

Insitro, Inc. was founded in 2018 as an AI-driven drug discovery company focused on leveraging machine learning and high-throughput biology to transform the way drugs are developed. Founder and CEO Daphne Koller stated:"For insitro, 2020 was an incredible year of growth and progress towards our vision of bringing the predictive power of machine learning to drug discovery."

"Our collaboration with Gilead in nonalcoholic steatohepatitis (NASH) has established and demonstrated the functionality of our target discovery platform, earning us our first operational milestone payment; our partnership with BMS in amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) has also been exceptional; through the acquisition of Haystack Sciences, a high-throughput chemistry platform that enables [machine learning]-driven molecular design, we have taken a significant step forward in moving from target to drug; we have also appointed Dr. Roger Perlmutter to our board to help guide our drug discovery efforts," said Daphne Koller.

It is reported that the new round of financing will be used to further expand the company's work and development pipeline, including exploring potentially licensable assets in Insitro's target and biomarker discovery efforts.