What You Should Know:
– Exscientia, leading AI drug discovery company, today announced that it completed its $100 million Series C financing round, with a further $30 million investment from Blackrock.
– This new capital, which will be used to support Exscientia’s platform development and proprietary pipeline, follows Exscientia’s demonstrated high growth, having announced earlier this year that the first ever precision engineered drug designed using AI had entered Phase I human clinical trials for the treatment of obsessive-compulsive disorder in partnership with Sumitomo Dainippon Pharma (DSP).
AI Drug Discovery Platform Overview
Founded in 2012, 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.
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.
Recent Traction/Milestones
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.
