Recursion Partners with Bayer to Accelerate Drug Discovery, Secures Series D Funding
September 11, 2020
In a double header of good news, Salt Lake City -based Recursion announced on Wednesday that the company has entered into a strategic collaboration agreement with Bayer to discover and develop new treatments for fibrotic diseases of the lung, kidney, heart and more. The agreement leverages Recursion’s AI drug discovery platform and Bayer’s small molecule expertise
Recursion also announced on Wednesday that that the company had secured $239 million in Series D financing. The financing was led by Leaps by Bayer, the impact investment arm of Bayer AG.
Commenting on the agreement with Bayer, Chris Gibson, PhD, co-founder and CEO of Recursion said, “We have the potential to elucidate novel biological pathways, targets and chemical entities across large disease domains, such as fibrosis, neurodegeneration, neuroinflammation and targeted oncology, which we believe will form the basis of early partnerships with key pharma stakeholders.”
“By bringing together biology and innovative AI technology, Recursion is changing the world of drug discovery like never before,”” said Kelvyn Cullimore, president and CEO of BioUtah. “And it’s happening right here in Utah, where the company began its journey.”
The Series D funding syndicate included new investors (Casdin Capital, Catalio Capital Management, LP, Laurion Capital Management, Samsara BioCapital and others) and Recursion’s existing major institutional investors (Baillie Gifford, Mubadala, DCVC, Lux Capital, Obvious Ventures, Felicis Ventures, EPIC Ventures, Two Sigma Ventures, Advantage Capital, Intermountain Ventures and others).
Leaps by Bayer is investing in transformative technologies with the ability to move the paradigm from treatment to cure,” said Juergen Eckhardt, MD, Head of Leaps by Bayer.
Gibson noted that this fundraising round will help the company continue to advance its mission to decode biology and radically improve lives.
Recursion’s drug discovery platform is based on a proprietary library of over half a billion images of human cells from more than 33 million experiments conducted in-house at Recursion. To date, Recursion has on-boarded over 750 cellular disease models to broadly interrogate diverse therapeutic areas.