Insilico Medicine Secures $95 Million Series D2 Funding Led by Saudi Aramco's Prosperity7 Ventures to Advance AI-Driven Drug Discovery and Global Expansion

On August 10, 2022, InSilico Medicine, a clinical-stage drug discovery company powered by end-to-end artificial intelligence, announced today that it had secured its Series D2 financing round, led by Prosperity7 Ventures, the diversified venture capital fund under Saudi Aramco. Following this round, InSilico Medicine has completed a total of $95 million in Series D financing, with participation from numerous professional investors worldwide specializing in biopharmaceuticals and life sciences.

This financing round welcomed Prosperity7 as a new investor, alongside existing investors from the Series D round, including: a large diversified asset management firm on the U.S. West Coast, Boston Investment, Warburg Pincus, Bohai Huamei (Shanghai) Equity Investment Fund, Qiming Venture Partners, Deerfield, Lanting Capital, BOLD Capital Partners, and WS Investment Company. Dr. Alex Zhavoronkov, Founder and CEO of InSilico Medicine, also participated in the investment personally.

Aysar Tayeb, Managing Director and Executive Director of Prosperity7 Ventures, stated, “The deepening application of artificial intelligence and machine learning in drug discovery has had a transformative impact on the pharmaceutical industry. We are delighted to partner with InSilico Medicine, a pioneer in this innovative field. Leveraging Saudi Aramco’s global network and substantial resources, Prosperity7 Ventures will support InSilico Medicine in accelerating its scale-up and expanding its global footprint, thereby advancing biotechnology and making a positive impact on human health.”

The newly raised Series D financing will further support InSilico Medicine in advancing its internally developed pipeline, including its lead candidate currently undergoing Phase I clinical trials simultaneously in New Zealand and China, as well as several investigational assets in the IND-enabling stage. The proceeds will also be allocated to key strategic initiatives, including the further development of its end-to-end AI-driven drug discovery platform, Pharma.AI; the advancement of fully automated intelligent robotic drug discovery laboratories and robotic biological data factories; and the establishment of regional centers worldwide.

Dr. Alex Zhavoronkov, Founder and CEO of InSilico Medicine, stated, “In 2022, Saudi Aramco became the world’s most valuable company by market capitalization. We are deeply honored to have secured a new round of financing led by Prosperity7 Ventures, the venture capital arm of Saudi Aramco that focuses on investing in ‘disruptive technologies.’ My previous visit to Saudi Arabia gave me a firsthand sense of the country’s tremendous technological leap forward. We look forward to playing a part in this transformation and leveraging the latest advances in artificial intelligence to help accelerate the realization of this vision.”

Leveraging its unique dual-CEO structure, InSilico Medicine is simultaneously advancing its artificial intelligence capabilities and drug discovery expertise. Following the completion of its Series D financing, Dr. Feng Ren, Chief Scientific Officer of InSilico Medicine, was appointed as Co-CEO to further strengthen the drug discovery team. Additionally, Dr. Ren will oversee the development of the company’s expanding clinical pipeline and play a leading role in driving business expansion. During his tenure as Chief Scientific Officer, InSilico Medicine rapidly transformed its internal R&D pipeline into a therapeutic portfolio composed of robust preclinical candidates that are highly innovative and novel, addressing unmet clinical needs. Currently, seven of InSilico Medicine’s ongoing projects have entered the IND-enabling stage, including a novel preclinical candidate 3CL protease inhibitor for the treatment of COVID-19, and two “synthetic lethality” anti-cancer therapies targeting MAT2A and USP1, respectively. Furthermore, the company’s most advanced anti-fibrosis program has successfully completed a Phase 0 microdosing study and is currently conducting Phase I clinical trials in New Zealand and China.

Dr. Feng Ren, Co-CEO and Chief Scientific Officer of InSilico Medicine, stated, “The company’s latest structure demonstrates that InSilico Medicine places equal emphasis on artificial intelligence and drug development. We are approaching several exciting milestones, including expanding our global operations, developing intelligent robotic laboratories, and achieving significant progress in our R&D pipeline. This round of financing will help us further enhance our capabilities, advance our internal R&D projects, develop our AI technology platform, and partner with stakeholders in Saudi Arabia to establish a new regional technology center.”

InSilico Medicine has established partnerships with multiple large pharmaceutical companies. Since the launch of its AI-powered target discovery engine, PandaOmics™, and its small molecule generation engine, Chemistry42™, in 2020, nine of the top 20 global pharmaceutical companies have licensed InSilico Medicine’s AI-driven drug discovery platform. In January and March 2022, InSilico Medicine entered into strategic collaborations with Fosun Pharma and EQRx, respectively. Notably, as part of the strategic partnership with Fosun Pharma, InSilico Medicine achieved its first major milestone in under 40 days by identifying a preclinical candidate targeting QPCTL for innovative cancer immunotherapy. External collaborations remain a crucial component of InSilico Medicine’s efforts to demonstrate and validate the strategic value of its Pharma.AI drug discovery platform.

InSilico Medicine is an end-to-end artificial intelligence (AI)-driven drug discovery company that connects biology, chemistry, and clinical trial analysis through next-generation AI systems. By leveraging modern machine learning techniques such as deep generative models, reinforcement learning, and transformer models, it builds a powerful and efficient AI-driven drug discovery platform to identify novel targets and generate candidate drugs with specific molecular structures. InSilico Medicine focuses on areas of unmet medical needs, including cancer, fibrosis, immunology, central nervous system disorders, and age-related diseases, to advance and accelerate the development of innovative therapies.

Prosperity7 Ventures (P7) is a diversified growth fund under Aramco Ventures, the venture capital arm of Saudi Aramco, the world’s leading integrated energy and chemicals company. The name “Prosperity7” refers to Saudi Arabia’s first oil-producing well, which was also the seventh well drilled in the country and is known as the “Well of Prosperity.” Building on this pioneering legacy, P7 takes a long-term view in making global investments that drive disruptive technological advancements and business model innovations, with the aim of fostering shared prosperity and positive impact worldwide. With a fund size of $1 billion, P7 has investment teams based in Saudi Arabia, the United States, and China. It focuses on investing in highly scalable startups in the Chinese and U.S. markets, spanning sectors such as enterprise IT, fintech, artificial intelligence, B2B, consumer technology, and health tech.