Profluent Has Raised $106 Million to Scale Up use of Its AI Models for Biology in Drug progress and Agriculture

Ali Madani started thinking about how AI coudl be programmed for biology in 2020, years before the launch of ChatGPT. the machine learning scientist was working at Salesforce, which that year launched a moonshot project, called ProGen, to design novel proteins with generative AI. “The same architecture used for English, you can use for biological languages like proteins,” he told Forbes.

He left Salesforce in 2022 and teamed up with Alexander Meeske, head of a research lab at the University of Washington, to bring that promise to life. Now, his Emeryville, California-based startup Profluent’s AI models enable scientists to explain the properties they want in a protein in human language (like stability or ease of manufacturing), and then output a DNA recipe to create that protein.

Madani, who has a Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley and was the lead author of a Nature Biotechnology paper on ProGen, believes focusing on proteins could unlock groundbreaking new drugs. Proteins are large molecules that are significantly more complex than the small molecules that are the basis of many existing drugs, but allow for newer treatments like gene therapies. And he hopes it also will lead to breakthroughs in agriculture, were researchers hope to create more resilient and sustainable crops.

“The proposition of making biology programmable is going to enable blockbuster drugs, and solutions across therapeutics, diagnostics and agriculture-and it’s going to require a lot of capital,” Madani said.

To that end, Profluent said Wednesday that it had raised $106 million in new venture funding led by Jeff bezos’s Bezos Expeditions and Altimeter Capital, bringing total investment to $150 million.With the new financing, Profluent’s valuation is approaching $1 billion. Its commercial partners include Revvity,an $11 billion (market cap) biotech; Corteva Agrisciences,the agricultural spinoff of DuPont; and VC-backed Ensoma,which is working on treatments for genetic diseases and cancer.

“The proposition of making biology programmable is going to enable blockbuster drugs … and it’s going to require a lot of capital.”
-Founder Ali Madani

AI-Driven Drug Discovery Startup Recursion Pharmaceuticals Raises $500 Million

Recursion Pharmaceuticals,a company using artificial intelligence to discover new drugs,announced Tuesday it has raised $500 million in new funding. The Series E round was led by Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, with participation from existing investors including Fidelity, Dragoneer Investment Group, and others.

the funding will allow Recursion to expand its platform and accelerate its drug discovery programs, focusing on areas with high unmet medical needs. Recursion’s approach involves generating massive datasets of biological images and using AI to identify patterns and predict which compounds are most likely to be effective against specific diseases.

“This financing is a testament to the strength of our platform and the potential of AI to transform drug discovery,” said Chris Gibson, CEO of Recursion, in a statement. “We are excited to partner with Chan Zuckerberg Initiative and our other investors to accelerate our mission of discovering and developing medicines for patients with rare diseases.”

Recursion isn’t alone in applying AI to drug discovery. Numerous startups and established pharmaceutical companies are investing heavily in the field, recognizing its potential to significantly reduce the time and cost of bringing new drugs to market. However, Recursion differentiates itself through its scale and focus on generating high-quality, thorough datasets.

The company’s founder and Chief Technology Officer, Navin Madani, explained that the success of their models relies on the amount of data they have. “One of the reasons Jeff [Bezos] was interested is that we have discovered scaling laws” apply to biology, Madani said. “As you gain more and more data, the models get better and better.”

Investor Jamin Ball, a partner at Altimeter Capital, believes there’s a “massive, massive, massive prospect” in the shift from chance in drug discovery to precise design.”we think the next frontier in AI will be biology and drug discovery,” he said.

“We are still really early,” Madani said, comparing the current state of AI-enabled biology to the early days of the internet.