Health Mubadala-backed Recursion secures new $50m funding By Reuters July 13, 2023 Unsplash.com The Recursion OS platform gives drugmakers access to datasets required for designing and developing therapeutics Chip designer Nvidia will invest $50 million to speed up training of biotech firm Recursion’s artificial intelligence models for drug discovery, the companies announced, sending Recursion’s shares surging about 83 percent. Recursion, whose advisers include AI pioneer Yoshua Bengio, will use its biological and chemical datasets exceeding 23,000 terabytes to train AI models on Nvidia’s cloud platform. Mubadala-backed investor in race to buy US publisher Mubadala invests in $440m LatAm fund Nvidia, seen as a big winner of the boom in AI, could then license those models to biotech firms through BioNeMo, a generative AI cloud service for drug discovery that it rolled out earlier this year. The digital biology company sold Nvidia more than 7.7 million of its Class A common stock, which equates to about a four percent stake in the company. It runs the Recursion OS platform that gives drugmakers access to datasets required for designing and developing therapeutics. The investment comes as Recursion strengthened its AI focus in May by snapping up two companies in the AI-driven drug discovery space for $87.5 million. Recursion plans to use Nvidia’s software to support its own pipeline, as well as its partners’. The Utah-based company’s current partners include Bayer and Roche. Recursion is conducting human trials for five of its drugs, including a candidate that is in mid-stage trials to treat a type of neurovascular disease caused by malformation of small blood vessels in the brain. Other prominent backers of the biotech firm include Abu Dhabi’s sovereign investor Mubadala and UK-based investment firm Baillie Gifford & Co.
