Recursion Pharmaceuticals $121 million Series C for AI drug discovery

Recursion Pharmceuticals has closed a $121 million Series C funding round, led by Scottish Mortgage Investment Trust, with participation from new and all prior institutional investors.

The funds will be invested to continue building Recursion’s AI-enabled drug discovery platform, as well as to develop capabilities to accelerate new chemical entity chemistry and predict safety pharmacology.

Recursion principally focuses on rare diseases within its own drug pipeline, and partners with major pharmaceutical companies across other therapeutic areas including immuno-oncology, oncology, aging, and inflammation.

“In under two years since closing our Series B round, we have put two drugs discovered on our platform into clinical trials, had our first discoveries with Takeda optioned, grown our automated experimental bandwidth by an order of magnitude, expanded beyond rare diseases into new therapeutic areas like inflammation, infectious disease and immuno-oncology, grown our team from 64 to 150-plus and added all-stars from the biotech and tech worlds, and opened a state-of-the-art, 100,000 square-foot headquarters in downtown Salt Lake City,” said Chris Gibson, CEO, Recursion.

Recursion’s rich, relatable database of more than two petabytes of biological images generated in-house on the company’s robotics platform enables advanced machine learning approaches to reveal drug candidates, mechanisms of action, and potential toxicity, with the eventual goal of decoding biology and advancing new therapeutics to radically improve lives. 

The company was founded in 2013 by Chris Gibson, Blake Borgeson, and Dean Li, and is headquartered in Salt Lake City. It closed a $60 million Series B round in October 2017.