Enveda has raised $311 million in Series E funding at a $2 billion valuation as the biotech startup advances medicines discovered with the help of artificial intelligence into human clinical trials. The new valuation is twice what the company was worth 12 months ago.
Catalio Capital Management led the financing, with participation from Iconiq and other investors. Enveda confirmed the funding in its official Series E announcement.
Enveda Uses AI to Search Nature for New Medicines
Founded in 2019 by Viswa Colluru, an early employee of Recursion Pharmaceuticals, Enveda searches plants, microbes and other natural sources for molecules that could become medicines. Its approach uses AI and other techniques to identify promising compounds rather than designing every drug candidate from scratch in a laboratory.
The company has built its drug discovery work around PRISM, its AI-based platform for identifying biologically active molecules found in nature. Enveda’s clinical pipeline now includes several candidates that have moved into human testing.
The funding follows early clinical progress for two of those medicines. One candidate, ENV-294, is being developed for inflammatory conditions, including moderate-to-severe atopic dermatitis.
Another, ENV-308, is aimed at metabolic health and is designed to help people maintain weight after stopping GLP-1 weight-loss treatments. Enveda reported positive Phase 1 results for ENV-308 in August and plans additional studies involving people who have discontinued or plan to discontinue GLP-1 therapies.
New Funding Will Support Further Clinical Development
Enveda plans to use the Series E funding to move its existing clinical-stage medicines into later phases of development and advance additional candidates for inflammatory and metabolic conditions into human trials. The company will also continue developing its AI-based drug discovery platform.
AI has not yet produced a drug that has received FDA approval, but Enveda is among the biotechnology companies moving AI-discovered drug candidates into clinical testing. Its latest financing gives the startup additional capital to test whether those candidates can progress through later stages of drug development.
The $2 billion valuation reported by TechCrunch represents a doubling from Enveda’s valuation a year earlier.
Featured image credits: Magnific.com
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