Inspired by Tu Youyou, the First Drug Candidate of an American AI Pharmaceutical Company Entered Clinical Trials and Received Eight Rounds of Financing in Five Years.
Enveda Biosciences (Enveda for short), an AI pharmaceutical startup in the United States, has been having a lot of good things happen to it recently.
On November 22, the company announced that it had completed a $130 million Series C financing round, bringing the total financing amount to $360 million.This was less than half a year after Enveda completed its $55 million Series B2 financing.
besides,At the end of October this year, ENV-294, the first drug candidate discovered using the Enveda platform, received IND approval from the US FDA and entered the Phase I clinical trial stage., a new first-in-class oral anti-inflammatory drug for atopic dermatitis and other inflammatory diseases. It is said that ENV-294 has shown strong efficacy and good safety in preclinical studies, and ENV-294 is expected to be launched in the market soon.
This may also be one of the reasons why Enveda received huge amounts of financing in just a few months.
It is worth mentioning that unlike mainstream pharmaceutical companies that conduct drug research and development based on chemically synthesized compound libraries, Enveda takes inspiration from nature and combines AI technology to conduct drug research and development from natural products (plants, microorganisms).
This unique approach to drug development has made Enveda a "star" in the AI pharmaceutical industry since its inception, and it was named "one of the top ten best startups in Denver" by LinkedIn.
Named one of the top 10 startups in Denver
Company website:
https://enveda.com/platform/
Inspired by Tu Youyou, Enveda is determined to take a different path
I believe that everyone is familiar with extracting compounds from plants for drug development. Artemisinin is one of them. Since artemisinin was promoted to the world by the World Health Organization in 2001, it has been widely used in the treatment of malaria and has saved the lives of millions of people around the world. The inventor of artemisinin, Tu Youyou, a famous Chinese pharmacist, was also awarded the 2015 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. This revolutionary antimalarial drug was extracted from Artemisia annua. In addition, salicylic acid, one of the active ingredients of aspirin, was originally extracted from willow trees.
Inspired by the success stories of artemisinin and aspirin, Viswa Colluru founded the AI pharmaceutical company Enveda in 2019, dedicated to bringing the next "artemisinin-like" new drug to patients.
It is worth mentioning that Viswa Colluru, the founder and CEO of the company, was born into a pharmacist family in Visakhapatnam, India, but he never thought of working in the pharmaceutical industry. The motivation for Colluru to change his career plan and try to engage in new drug research and development came from his mother's experience. In 1998, Colluru's mother was diagnosed with Philadelphia chromosome-positive chronic myeloid leukemia (CML), and there was no effective treatment for this disease at that time.
Until 2001, his mother's condition was alleviated by Imatinib, a drug that had just been approved in the United States. Colluru was able to spend more time with his mother, which made him deeply feel the profound impact of the new treatment on patients and their families. Because of this, his career plan changed from computer science to biological research, hoping that one day he could provide life-saving power and hope to as many people as possible.
After graduating from the PhD program,Colluru joined the AI pharmaceutical company Recursion.He became a product manager and led a portfolio of multiple disease indications, covering neurology, oncology and metabolic diseases, which accumulated rich experience for his subsequent entrepreneurship.
Colluru believes that "some of the world's greatest medical breakthroughs have come from chemicals found in nature at just 0.1%."In order to fully utilize the unexplored chemical components in nature for new drug discovery, Colluru founded Enveda with $225,000 funded by Recursion's chief security officer. The company's mission is to combine ancient therapies with advanced AI technology to decode the complex chemical composition of nature - including compounds in plants, microorganisms and other natural resources - to develop new therapies.
Contains 38,000 medicinal plants, accelerating drug candidate discovery by more than 4 times
Enveda's main research and development focus is to solve the treatment problems in the fields of inflammation, fibrosis and neurosensory biology, especially in the fields of gastrointestinal, dermatology and pulmonary treatment. To this end, the company has created an AI-driven drug discovery platform that combines metabolomics data with machine learning and high-throughput biological experiments to answer two core questions based on large-scale natural samples: (1) What are these molecules? (2) What do they do?
In just 4 years, Enveda's platform has characterized the structure and function of more than 1 million natural compounds.The company has built the world's largest searchable natural products library, linking 38,000 medicinal plants to a database of 12,000 human diseases and symptoms.
In May of this year, Enveda reached a cooperation with Microsoft.The largest small molecule mass spectrometry machine learning model to date, PRISM, was released. The PRISM model was built using Azure and trained with more than 1 billion unlabeled mass spectrometry data. It can interpret the "chemical language" of the entire sample, thereby prioritizing potential drug molecules. Based on this, Enveda converts prioritized compounds into candidate drugs 4 times faster than the industry average, truly achieving a leap forward in drug research and development.
besides,Enveda's pipeline lineup is also very strong, including 10 development candidates and multiple discovery projects, covering immunity and inflammation, obesity, fibrosis, and neurosensory indications, with "first-in-class" and "best-in-class" potential.
As the first drug candidate discovered using the Enveda platform, ENV-294 received IND approval from the US FDA and entered Phase I clinical trials at the end of October this year. ENV-294 is a new first-in-class oral anti-inflammatory drug for atopic dermatitis (such as eczema) and other inflammatory diseases. It is also the first drug candidate to enter clinical trials after discovering natural molecules through AI and combining them with modern medicinal chemistry.
Phase I trials are an early stage in drug development, and most drugs fail to complete the entire process. Colluru said that if the company can successfully prove the safety and efficacy of ENV-294, it will take at least 5-7 years for the drug to go from Phase I trials to market.
“Today’s achievement highlights the progress we have made in a short period of time, which not only creates tremendous opportunities for Enveda, but also brings hope to physicians and patients around the world,” Colluru added. “We look forward to building on this momentum and bringing relief to people living with eczema, other inflammatory diseases, and more as our pipeline continues to mature.”
With eight rounds of financing in five years, Enveda has become a dark horse in the field of AI pharmaceuticals
Since its establishment in 2019, Enveda has successfully raised eight rounds of financing in just five years.In these eight rounds of financing, in addition to investors who invested money to support Enveda's research and development from the beginning, such as True Ventures, Village Global, and The Nature Conservancy, there are also some new investors who heard the news and continued to enter the market. For example, Microsoft joined in Enveda's B++ round of financing. In addition to financial support, Microsoft also provided computing resources for Enveda's new drug discovery platform, which ultimately led to the birth of the PRISM model.
In the C round of financing in November, Enveda received US$130 million. This round of financing was led by Kinnevik and FPV, and followed by Baillie Gifford, Premji Invest, Lingotto Innovation, Lux Capital, Dimension Capital, True Ventures, Cresset Partners, The Nature Conservancy and Henry R. Kravis.Ultimately, Enveda's total financing reached $360 million, and its current valuation has exceeded $400 million.
In addition to its innovative technical ideas, Enveda also has a clear strategic route and has achieved phased results. In June this year, after receiving a $55 million Series B++ round, Enveda announced that it would advance clinical trials later this year and conduct a Series C round of financing afterwards.
Now, five months later, Enveda has kept its word and successfully made ENV-29 pass the IND review of the US FDA and enter the Phase I clinical trial stage. As for the use of the $130 million in funds obtained this time, Enveda said it will continue to advance its deep pipeline of 10 development candidate drugs and multiple discovery projects, and focus on obtaining IND and entering the clinical trial stage in 2025-2026. It can be seen that Enveda has invested funds in drug research and development after each round of financing, and has achieved some results, which has greatly boosted the confidence of shareholders.
Christian Scherrer, Senior Investment Director and Head of Health and Bio at Kinnevik, one of the lead investors, said:"Enveda continues to deliver on the promise of its platform with world-class execution, which gives us confidence that the team can realize the full potential of its ambitious vision to sequence the chemistry of life to advance human and planetary health."
Final Thoughts
Currently, the traditional pharmaceutical industry faces multiple challenges. According to Nature data, it takes an average of more than 10 years and costs about $2.6 billion to develop a new drug worldwide, but the clinical success rate is less than 10%. These pain points lead to slow drug launches and high treatment costs, which seriously hinder patients from obtaining innovative therapies in a timely manner.
However, the emergence of AI has injected new hope into the pharmaceutical industry. AI can accelerate drug discovery and development through deep learning algorithms and big data analysis, and has shown great potential in molecular screening, drug repositioning, and the formulation of personalized treatment plans. Especially since 2020, the value of AI in the pharmaceutical field has gradually been verified, and drugs have entered the clinical trial stage. Although they have not yet been officially launched on the market, the exploration of AI pharmaceuticals is still in its early stages, but the development momentum is strong.
Looking into the future, AI pharmaceutical manufacturing is expected to accelerate drug launches while improving the accessibility and precision of treatments, truly realizing the goal of “every patient has access to medicine,” and making unprecedented contributions to human health and well-being.
Finally, let me share a technical salon! The 6th Meet AI Compiler will be held in Shanghai on December 28. Click on the picture to learn about the lecturer's sharing topics and scan the QR code to sign up directly.
2.https://siliconangle.com/2024/11/21/enveda-biosciences-raises-130m-advance-ai-driven-drug-discovery-natural-compounds/
3.https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20241121310215/en/Enveda-Closes-130M-Series-C-Funding-to-Deliver-Multiple-Clinical-Readouts-from-a-Pipeline-of-10-Development-Candidates
4.https://www.ddw-online.com/ai-discovered-natural-eczema-medicine-advances-to-clinical-trials-32472-202411/
5.https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/GMbEy58-NKRmc0XT82wGlQ
6.https://biomarker.substack.com/