AI Drug Discovery Company Fermion Secures Over RMB 100 Million in Series A Funding

Yiou Health, November 12 News: Recently, AI-driven new drug companyFermionFermion (hereinafter referred to as “Fermion”) has completed cumulative Series A financing exceeding RMB 100 million. Investors in this round include Panda Capital, Guangzhou Jinkong Fund Management Co., Ltd., and Shenzhen Cosun Investment Management LTD, among others. Previously, the team secured Pre-A financing led by Challenger Capital, with Panda Capital participating as a co-investor.

The funds from this round of financing will be primarily used to upgrade the team, refine the company's technical and data models, and expand the number of collaborations in its product pipeline.

Fermion Technology focuses on building an AI-assisted drug development platform for small-molecule chemical drugs. Through in-depth collaboration with CROs and original research pharmaceutical companies, it leverages deep learning, reinforcement learning, generative adversarial networks, big data, and knowledge graphs.Artificial IntelligenceApplication of Technology in New Drug R&D: Leveraging AI to Enhance the Efficiency and Success Rate of Preclinical Development of Small-Molecule Novel Drugs.

According to Fermion, its FermiNet small-molecule R&D platform, powered by deep learning, covers the entire workflow from target identification to preclinical candidate compounds. The platform can automatically generate small molecules with physicochemical properties similar to those of existing active compounds for a given target, achieving over 50% coverage of real-world chemical libraries, while also producing a greater number of novel, patentable compounds and diverse scaffold types. These generated compounds exhibit improved binding affinity, synthetic feasibility, and ADMET (absorption, distribution, metabolism, excretion, and toxicity) profiles. By predicting multidimensional medicinal chemistry properties of compounds, the platform helps reduce the risks and costs associated with drug development.

It is reported that the platform’s fragment-based rapid scaffold hopping approach offers superior multi-start optimization performance, enabling medicinal chemistry researchers to efficiently “blend” diverse fragments from multiple known active compounds targeting a specific entity, thereby rapidly generating lead compounds. Fermion stated that, compared with traditional pharmaceutical companies, it can save 1–2 years in the timeline from target selection to the preclinical candidate (PCC) stage.

In 2018, Deng Daiguo, CEO of Fermion, led his team to apply AI technology to the pharmaceutical industry, establishing Fermion Technology. In fact, he had already embarked on his entrepreneurial journey as early as 2015. At that time, he and his team pioneered the application of AI technology to fabric image search engines, creating the industry’s first B2B trading platform for fabrics based on a large-scale image information search engine. The venture secured multiple rounds of financing from investors including Sinovation Ventures, Zero One Ventures, Microlight Capital (founded by Wu Xiaoguang, former Senior Vice President of Tencent), and other industry-specific capital firms.

Currently, Fermion’s client repurchase rate stands at nearly 100%. When discussing the reasons behind this, Deng Daiguo, CEO of Fermion, stated that data reliability and deterministic commercial delivery are the core of B2B business. In addition, the monthly transaction volume exceeds RMB 50 million.Corporate ServicesThis experience has enabled the team to accumulate substantial expertise in the structure and logic of B2B operations, facilitating rapid communication and collaboration with enterprises.

While providing AI-assisted drug development technologies to other pharmaceutical companies, Fermion is also committed to co-developing pipelines with listed pharmaceutical enterprises. Currently, in the fields of inflammation and metabolism, Fermion has multiple product pipelines that have all reached the Preclinical Candidate (PCC) stage and are expected to file Investigational New Drug (IND) applications in 2021.

“Fermion positions itself asAI Drug Discovery“The company, rather than an AI technology firm, was established based on these considerations. Our core objective is to generate high-quality, druggable molecular data,” stated Dai Guo Deng.

Regarding future development plans, Deng Daiguo stated: “In the past two years, most of Fermion’s collaborative projects have been at the pre-PCC stage or earlier. We aim to deepen our collaborations with pharmaceutical companies at the PCC stage, the IND stage, and even through Phase I clinical trials. Meanwhile, we will further increase our investments in algorithms and data to establish a comprehensive, novel AI-driven solution for preclinical small-molecule drug development, while also building a more robust product pipeline.”

This article is sourced from EqualOcean, an original piece by author Mi Congcong. For reprint or collaboration, please click here.Reprint Notice, unauthorized reposting will be subject to legal liability.