AI Drug Discovery Firm Insilico Medicine Secures $37M Series B Led by Qiming Venture Partners

On September 10, VCBeat learned that AI-driven drug discovery company InSilico Medicine recently completed a $37 million Series B financing round, led by Qiming Venture Partners. Other investors, including existing Series A backers, participated in the round, such as STIC Investments, F-Prime Capital, Lilly Asia Ventures, Sinovation Ventures, Baidu Venture Capital, Lanting Investment, and BOLD Capital Partners.

InSilico Medicine is a pioneer in drug discovery leveraging next-generation artificial intelligence technologies. The funds raised in this round will be used to industrialize its small-molecule design platform and target discovery platform, assemble a management team with extensive experience in the pharmaceutical industry, and further develop its product pipeline in cancer, fibrosis, NASH, immunology, and central nervous system diseases through collaborations with major pharmaceutical companies.

InSilico Medicine has developed and validated a suite of algorithms for generative models and machine learning to design small-molecule targeted therapies. Meanwhile, the company can identify targets in cancer, fibrosis, NASH, immunology, and central nervous system diseases through its target discovery platform. In terms of business model, InSilico Medicine drives the development of the pharmaceutical industry in the digital age by collaborating with early-stage biotechnology companies and large biopharmaceutical firms.

“We are pleased to lead this round of financing for InSilico Medicine,” said Ms. Nisa Leung, Managing Partner at Qiming Venture Partners. “InSilico is an industry leader in the field of AI-driven drug discovery and development. We look forward to the company leveraging its advanced technologies to shorten drug development timelines and generate synergies with other portfolio companies of Qiming Venture Partners.”

InSilico Medicine has established close collaborations with biotechnology companies, pharmaceutical companies, and academic institutions. Since its inception, the company has published or co-published more than 70 papers in specialized journals and at artificial intelligence conferences. Notably, InSilico Medicine recently published a latest research paper in Nature Biotechnology, a subsidiary journal of Nature. The study primarily demonstrates the design of small-molecule targeted drugs using generative models and reinforcement learning algorithms, and validates the activity and preliminary pharmacokinetic properties of the designed molecules in cellular and animal models.

About Qiming Venture Partners

Qiming Venture Partners was established in 2006 and has successively set up offices in Shanghai, Beijing, Suzhou, Shenzhen, Hong Kong, Seattle, Boston, and the San Francisco Bay Area. Currently, Qiming Venture Partners manages seven U.S. dollar funds and five RMB funds, with total assets under management exceeding USD 4 billion.

Since its inception, the firm has focused on investing in outstanding early- and growth-stage companies in sectors such as TMT and Healthcare. To date, Qiming Venture Partners has invested in more than 310 companies, of which over 60 have gone public on exchanges including the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE), NASDAQ, the Hong Kong Stock Exchange, the Taipei Exchange, the Shanghai Stock Exchange, and the Shenzhen Stock Exchange, or have exited through mergers and acquisitions. Nearly 30 of its portfolio companies have been recognized as industry unicorns and super unicorns.

About InSilico Medicine

InSilico Medicine is an emerging artificial intelligence company headquartered in Hong Kong, with offices in six countries worldwide. The company is dedicated to transforming the pharmaceutical industry by developing and applying next-generation deep learning methods to enable every step of the drug discovery and development process. InSilico Medicine continuously collaborates with the most innovative biopharmaceutical companies to conduct disease-related analyses, validating its solutions and generating high-quality, machine-learning-ready data.

Since 2015, InSilico Medicine has been a global pioneer in employing generative adversarial networks (GANs) and reinforcement learning (RL) to develop novel drug molecules, a technology applicable to diseases with both known and unknown targets.