Syneron Tech Secures Tens of Millions in Pre-A Funding to Accelerate AI-Powered Synthetic Peptide Drug Discovery Platform

VCBeat learned第一时间 that Syneron Tech has announced the completion of a multi-million dollar pre-A round of financing.

Syneron Bio was founded in April 2022, incubated by the top-tier innovation platform of Beijing Hulian Innovation Works Investment Management Limited, and has successively received seed and angel round investments from three funds under Innovation Works. Within less than a year of its establishment, the company completed its Pre-A round of financing, led jointly by Legend Capital and Gree Industrial Investment, with a total investment amounting to tens of millions of US dollars. After the completion of this round of financing, Syneron Bio willAccelerate the development of an AI + synthetic peptide drug R&D platform and advance multiple synthetic peptide drug pipelines targeting "undruggable" targets.

Synthetic peptides are an entirely new class of peptide drugs. Traditional peptide drugs are primarily modified from natural peptides found in living organisms, whereas synthetic peptides are artificially designed and synthesized peptide compounds that do not exist in nature, with their constituent amino acids also not being entirely natural. Compared to natural peptides, synthetic peptides exhibit properties such as structural rigidity, in vivo stability, and strong target affinity. In contrast to small molecules, synthetic peptides have a larger interaction surface area with target proteins, bind more tightly, and demonstrate higher specificity. When compared to large molecule drugs like antibodies, synthetic peptides can penetrate membranes and act on numerous intracellular "undruggable" targets.

The company is committed to accelerating the R&D of synthetic peptide drugs through AI empowerment and has built an industry-leading AI + synthetic peptide drug R&D platform. This platform achieves full-chain empowerment of AI in the design, screening, synthesis, characterization, and optimization of synthetic peptide drugs, and has been applied to the R&D of multiple global new (First in class) synthetic peptide drug pipelines.

Dr. Zhang Xiao, Co-founder and CEO of Syneron BioStated: "We are honored to receive recognition and support from well-known investment institutions such as Legend Capital and Gree Industrial Investment during this capital winter. We also thank Dr. Kai-Fu Lee, Chairman and CEO of Innovation Works, and the professional colleagues at Innovation Works for their tremendous assistance and ongoing support during the company's incubation phase. Our original intention in founding Syneron Bio was to address the backdrop of declining R&D efficiency and sluggish growth in the global biotech industry, while AI technology based on natural language processing continues to achieve revolutionary progress. We aim to discover innovative drug modalities with strong scalability and drug-like properties, and to develop blockbuster drugs with the greatest market potential for these modalities using the highly efficient paradigm of AI-driven dry-wet closed-loop processes. We are pleased that within less than a year of our establishment, the company has made substantial progress in team building, AI algorithm system development, drug pipeline advancement, and securing additional funding. We look forward to accelerating and enhancing our business development after the completion of this round of financing."

Chairman and CEO of Innovation Works, Kai-Fu LeeStated: "Innovation Works has always been focused on the technological breakthroughs and opportunities brought by the intersection of AI for Science. Against the backdrop of the groundbreaking progress in protein structure prediction achieved by Alphafold2, we see a clear development logic in the 'sequence-structure-function' direction of AI + protein, with AI demonstrating tremendous potential in the field of protein design. Innovation Works identified and assisted in the incubation of Syneron Bio from the ground up. Within just one year of its establishment, the company has built an international, interdisciplinary team. We look forward to Syneron Bio gradually becoming a world-leading AI pharmaceutical company."

He Zhiqiang, Senior Vice President of Lenovo Group and President of Lenovo Venture GroupSaid: "In recent years, artificial intelligence has become a new engine driving the rapid growth of the pharmaceutical industry. Compared with the traditional drug development model, AI-driven drug research and development relies more on data-driven approaches. The requirements for data quality and breadth to train models are much stricter. This also places higher demands on start-ups in the AI pharmaceuticals sector: highly specialized interdisciplinary talents in biology and data, products with dry-to-wet closed-loop capabilities, and so on. Syneron Bio possesses such a multidisciplinary professional team. Its AI + deep learning peptide drug discovery platform achieves a full closed-loop process from discovery, prediction, screening to lab testing for peptide drugs, enabling Syneron Bio to continuously lead the peptide drug R&D market. We look forward to joining hands with Syneron Bio to empower industrial upgrading through technological strength."

Hu Chuanwei, Vice President of Gree Group and Chairman of Gree Industrial Investment"In the past six decades, the number of approved peptide drugs has steadily increased. Best-selling peptide drugs are mostly endocrine and metabolism-related receptor agonists, such as insulin. There is still a huge unmet therapeutic demand in the peptide drug market. With technological advancements, synthetic peptides have the potential to address issues that neither small molecules nor large molecule drugs can solve, especially for 'undruggable' targets. Emerging peptide technologies will be applied in pharmaceuticals, including multifunctional peptides, cell-penetrating peptides, and peptide-drug conjugates, which will significantly expand the application scope of therapeutic peptide drugs."

Ren Bo, Executive Director of Innovation Works and General Manager of Frontier Technology FundStated: "Cutting-edge life science technology is a key focus area for Innovation Works. We believe that 'AI + Life Sequences' presents systematic opportunities. Currently, Innovation Works has made a series of strategic investments around the central dogma in areas such as gene-editing tool discovery, RNA design, and protein design. Syneron Bio, leveraging its team's long-term expertise in the biopharmaceutical field, early on established a differentiated approach to designing peptide drugs targeting undruggable targets. The company has demonstrated exceptional execution and efficiency in closing the dry-wet loop and achieving industrial implementation. We look forward to the company developing pipelines with international competitiveness in the future."