(Bloomberg) -- Enveda Therapeutics Inc., a startup that uses artificial intelligence to find promising drug candidates, has raised $130 million just a few months after its last financing.
The new funding round was led by Nordic investor Kinnevik and FPV Ventures, with participation from new and existing investors including Baillie Gifford, Lux Capital and the Nature Conservancy. It comes as Boulder, Colorado-based Enveda launches a Phase I clinical trial for an oral drug that aims to treat atopic dermatitis, or eczema.
Enveda based the drug on a molecule it found by combing through naturally occurring chemical compounds with AI, and hopes it will treat eczema without the side effects of many other treatments on the market. The startup announced the trial earlier this month and said it had already enrolled its first patient.
“The very exciting aspect of this, as well as other drugs in the pipeline, is they attack big problems faced by a large number of people,” said founder and Chief Executive Officer Viswa Colluru.
Enveda most recently raised a $55 million announced in June, on top of $51 million last year. Its previous valuation was $400 million. The company declined to provide its latest valuation, but said it was higher than previously.
Though it’s still early, AI has struggled to live up to its promise for drug development — one of the fields AI optimists have been the most enthusiastic about. In Enveda’s case, it combines its proprietary AI with mass spectrometry data, gleaning key information about chemical structures. The process works on thousands of molecules at a time, speeding up the discovery of promising molecules for medicine.
Next year, Enveda plans to launch a trial of a drug to treat inflammatory bowel diseases like Crohn’s. It has a total of 10 molecules in its development pipeline, including the eczema and inflammatory-bowel disease molecules.
Phase I trials are an early stage of drug development, and most drugs don’t make it through the full process. Going from Phase I to market will take at least five to seven years, Colluru estimates, if the company can successfully prove safety and and efficacy of its products.
Investor Lingotto Innovation Strategy, which first backed in Enveda earlier this year and participated in this latest round, got interested in the company because of its relatively novel approach, and the potential to find candidate drugs faster and at a lower cost than the industry average.
“We’re pretty strongly of the view that the whole drug discovery process is badly broken,” said James Anderson, chief investment officer at Lingotto Innovation. Too much attention focuses on genomics, he says, and not enough on chemistry.
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