Hong Kong-based artificial intelligence (AI) drug discovery firm Insilico Medicine has raised $60 million in a Series D round of financing, less than one year after the completion of its previous Warburg Pincus-led investment at $255 million.
Insilico raised the fresh capital from a mix of new investors, including an unspecified asset management firm on the US West Coast and BHR Investment, as well as old investors, including Warburg Pincus, B Capital, Qiming Venture Partners, BOLD Capital Partners and Pavilion Capital. Insilico founder and CEO Alex Zhavoronkov also invested in the Series D round.
The new funding “will further bolster Insilico’s solid financial position during a volatile market environment”, the firm said in a statement. The proceeds will help the firm fund its ongoing global expansion and planned initiatives, including the launch of a fully automated, AI-driven robotic drug discovery laboratory and a robotic biological data factory.
Insilico was launched in 2014 at the Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, before its founder Alex Zhavoronkov moved the headquarters to Hong Kong in April 2019, relocating closer to the mainland China market, which he believed was “the future of the world’s pharmaceutical industry”.
Insilico has developed AI platforms that utilise deep generative models, reinforcement learning, transformers and other modern machine learning techniques to discover novel targets and design novel molecular structures with desired properties. It works with pharmaceutical and biotech companies, including China’s Fosun Pharma and Massachusetts, US-based EQRX, to help them streamline R&D efforts and cut costs substantially.
Its solutions cover the creation and discovery of innovative drugs for cancer, fibrosis, immunity, central nervous system diseases and age-related diseases.
CHINA DEAL MONITOR
DealStreetAsia has also put together a table listing all prominent venture capital transactions in the Greater China region from May 30 to June 1, 2022.
