This Startup Has Raised Nearly $100 Million To Make Good On The Promise Of AI For Drug Discovery
Summary
He’s got a point - fewer than 10% of promising drugs that begin the clinical process end up making it to market, and that figure has remained constant for years. The company was founded around 18 months ago and in July 2019 raised a series A round of nearly $100 million from Flagship Pioneering and PSP Investments. “The whole thought process of reimaging this entire drug development cycle was very, very exciting to me,” says Ron Hovsepian, an executive partner at Flagship. The second differentiator, he says, is Valo’s computational platform, Opal, which it uses to develop models that predict what types of molecules might make for useful drugs in a fully integrated approach that looks at not just a particular biological pathway, but the whole patient. Numerate was focused on using its computational models to screen promising drug candidates, with an eye to making sure the best moved on in the development process.