Exscientia Completes $100 million Series C Financing Round With BlackRock Funds
04 Marzo 2021 - 01:00AM
Business Wire
Proceeds to further accelerate AI drug
discovery platform and pipeline
Exscientia, a clinical stage pharmatech pioneering the use of
artificial intelligence (AI) to design new drugs, today announced
that funds managed by BlackRock joined the Company’s Series C
investment round. Including existing Series C investors, Novo
Holdings, Evotec, Bristol Myers Squibb, and GT Healthcare Capital,
the round totalled $100 million in funding.
This new capital will be used to support Exscientia’s platform
development towards autonomous drug design. In addition, the
company will extend its proprietary pipeline into clinical trials
and expand existing capabilities in biological analytics that
support target selection and portfolio development.
With the company’s end-to-end AI-first drug discovery platform,
CentaurAI™, Exscientia has been able to generate novel drugs and
overcome conventional drug discovery limitations several years
faster than industry benchmarks. Exscientia has demonstrated the
platform’s capabilities by creating the first fully AI-designed
drug to enter clinical trials and advancing multiple drug
candidates into preclinical testing. In addition to its growing
proprietary pipeline, the company has conducted drug discovery
partnerships with Bristol-Myers Squibb, Sanofi, Bayer and Dainippon
Sumitomo as well as several biotech companies.
“Exscientia is breaking ground in small molecule drug design,
with a platform that radically improves drug discovery” says
William Abecassis, Head of BlackRock’s Innovation Capital who will
join Exscientia’s Board of Directors as an observer. “We are
thrilled to be investing in this world-class team, who are already
delivering results with AI-designed drugs now entering clinical
trials."
Andrew Hopkins, CEO of Exscientia added, “We are delighted that
BlackRock shares our vision for revolutionising how drugs are
discovered. It is also recognition of the ingenuity and hard work
of our employees to turn the promise of AI into reality today,
where we are bringing the world’s first AI designed drugs into the
clinic. BlackRock’s investment is an important step in our vision
that all drugs will be designed by AI. I believe that our company’s
reimagined approach to drug discovery will become the new de facto
standard.”
Exscientia has doubled in size over the past year and expects to
double again in 2021, including a recent US expansion into Miami
and Boston. The company employs over 100 people from over 20
different nations, with equal balance of technologists and drug
discovery scientists, of which 60% are PhDs. Exscientia is named
the fastest growing private biotech or pharmaceutical company in
the UK in the 2021 Alantra Pharma Fast 50, as well as one of the
fastest growing healthcare companies in the Financial Times
FT1000.
ENDS
About Exscientia
Exscientia is an Artificial Intelligence (AI)-driven pharmatech
committed to discovering and designing the best possible medicines
in the fastest and most effective manner. Exscientia is the first
company to progress AI-designed small molecules into the clinical
setting and repeatedly demonstrate the ability of AI to transform
the how drugs are created.
Drug design is precision engineering at the molecular scale.
Exscientia has built dedicated AI systems that efficiently learn
from the widest range of data and consistently reapply enhanced
knowledge through iterations of design. Because Exscientia’s AI
platform learns more effectively and rapidly than human-led efforts
alone, candidate molecules satisfying complex therapeutic
requirements are created with revolutionary efficiency. Exscientia
believes that designing better drugs, faster, will allow the best
ideas of science to rapidly become the best medicines for
patients.
For more information visit us on www.exscientia.ai or follow us
on Twitter @exscientiaAI
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contact@exscientia.ai