BenevolentAI Secures $115 Million Funding to Boost Drug Discovery Efficiency by 60%

On April 20, VCBeat learned that biotech “unicorn” BenevolentAI announced it had raised $115 million from new and existing investors, boosting its pre-money valuation to $2 billion. This marks one of the largest funding rounds in the AI-driven pharmaceutical industry. Since its founding in 2013, the company has raised over $200 million in total.

BenevolentAI is dedicated to applying artificial intelligence to develop new drugs for intractable diseases. It is the first fully integrated AI company with both drug discovery and clinical development capabilities. BenevolentAI’s advanced technologies have disrupted the traditional pharmaceutical industry model by lowering costs, increasing success rates, and shortening the R&D timeline.BenevolentAI’s current drug development portfolio demonstrates its ability to shorten the early-stage drug discovery timeline by four years, with the potential to improve average R&D efficiency by 60% across the entire drug development process.For more information about BenevolentAI, please click on 《BenevolentAI: Europe’s largest AI-driven drug discovery company sold two drugs in development for $800 million》

To achieve this goal, BenevolentAI has created a biomedical AI system designed to discover new drugs and therapies for diseases. It employs proprietary algorithms to perform complex reasoning on over 50 billion ingested and contextualized facts, extracting knowledge and generating sophisticated insights into disease etiologies that have hitherto been beyond human understanding.

The company’s advanced technology has been proven to outperform human scientists in understanding the causes of diseases and can rapidly generate drug candidates at scale. The technology is also capable of deciphering the molecular processes of diseases and linking these disease characteristics to patients, ensuring that the optimal drug candidates are matched with the most suitable patients.

The company’s artificial intelligence technology is being utilized to develop treatment regimens tailored to patients with a wide spectrum of diseases, including motor neuron disease, Parkinson’s disease, glioblastoma, and sarcopenia. At BenevolentAI’s newly acquired Cambridge research facility, novel drug molecules are generated through semi-automated processes for subsequent stages of investigation.

▲ Dr. Ken Mulvany, Founder and Chairman of BenevolentAI (Image source: BenevolentAI official website)

BenevolentAI will leverage the funds raised to conduct large-scale drug development activities, expand its portfolio of targeted diseases, and further enhance the capabilities of its artificial intelligence platform. A portion of the funding will be allocated to extending BenevolentAI’s capabilities to other science-based industries, such as advanced materials, agriculture, and energy storage. The company has already made significant progress in accelerating drug development, including the initiation of more than 20 drug programs to date.

Dr. Ken Mulvany, Founder and Chairman of BenevolentAI, commented: “We are very pleased with the response to our fundraising. This reflects the rapidly growing global interest in AI-driven pharmaceuticals and serves as recognition of our position as a key player in this field. Since the company pioneered its business in 2013, we have come a long way. Our current technological capabilities did not exist six years ago. We are pioneering this sector and have evolved into a fully integrated, AI-enabled drug development company capable of delivering better medicines at speeds previously unimaginable. This means patients will receive the right medicines at lower costs and in less time.”

References:

[1] BenevolentAI raises $115 million to extend its leading global position in the field of AIenabled drug development

[2] AIpharma start-up BenevolentAI now worth $2 billion after $115 million funding boost

[3] BenevolentAI Official Website

Source: WuXi AppTec