Venture: Major Funding for AI Startup
Atomwise is a San Francisco based Artificial Intelligence (AI) tech startup that has been developing AI systems using deep leaning algorithms and supercomputers for drug discovery. Atomwise have announced that they have just raked in another $123 million Series B funding to focus on creating drugs for the vast numbers of genetic diseases that do not have one yet. By doing this the company can set historic medical landmarks and can change the future of the world.
Atomwise has provided over 750 research collaborations addressing over 600 disease targets and currently are working with top-pharmaceutical and biotech partners. This is all done to streamline and design new drugs for “undruggable” targets with speed and scale. Back in 2018 Atomwise raised its first startup money of $45 million for its AI-powered drug discovery platform. 2 years later they have already begun to go their Series B funding of $123 million, bringing the total amount of capital raised to a near $175 million brought to you by the B Capital Group and Sanabil Investments.
(Credit Atomwise)
When Abe Heifets what is to come for the next eight years he stated that, “Scaling the technology and scaling the team and scaling what we’ve been doing with it”. Atomwise is ready to become a larger company but has not had the means of doing it. With the high flux of money coming into the company not only are their investors looking for some sort of return on their investment, but they will be expected by the rest of the biotech field.
Not only do they plan to go larger with the company but are looking to develop and commercialize its discoveries by taking over more of the development process and working with manufacturers at a later stage. By being able to get control over their vast market it will take large steps in advancement for that to happen. As they are in a competitive and everchanging field they will work with what they know first.
A year ago Atomwise tipped its new strategy last year with it announced a partnership with Velocity Drug Development and a $14.5 million investment to create X-37. The X-37 is a spin-ff that’s developing small molecule therapies for endodermal cancers, which includes cancers of the liver, pancreas, colon, stomach and bladder. The main power behind Atomwises drug platform is the ability it has to harness machine learning to structure new proteins that have never existed. While doing this the main mission to accomplish a desired task, whatever the problem may be with the patient.
It is a lot of information that goes into what AI companies do, as their project can be difficult to follow for the common eye, but we constantly see them in the news. Many medical technology companies are getting major investments because of how the tides are changing in the world. Ever since the COVID-19 pandemic many people have had growing concerns with their health and are going to soon set more precautionary measures to protect themselves and their families.
Atomwise being one of the leaders in this industry where they have worked with 750 academic research collaborations addressing more than 600 disease targets, to model and screen over 16 billion new molecules for virtual screening. From this information they have generated molecules that have 17 pending patent applications with many peer-reviewed publications.
The co-founder and managing partner at B Capital Croup Raj Ganguly stated that, “ New technologies are enabling better and faster R&D for the life of the science industry. The advancements Atomwise has made with its computational drug discovery platform have effectively cut months or even years off the R&D lifecycle. More importantly, however, they are solving biology problems previously believed to be unsolvable by researchers and delivering that capability to everyone from academics to big pharma. We’re excited to continue to partner with the Atomwise team on its mission to develop new, more effective therapies.”
With resounding discussions around this company is it clear why they have been getting so much attention from investors and the medical field. With many more projections like this in the future it begs the question of what the future has in store for the rest of the world. Every year as new medical advances are made we more and more tight competition that is being made in the world. This is going to help everyone the rest of the world because it will inevitably force other companies to perform better and work on their own technology.
The AI medical field is leaving human error out of the question as people are making computers smarter than themselves. This is what must be relied on because the margin of error needs to be slim when dealing with ones health.
Overall, as we all become more trusting in the healthcare system of our country it is clear that not only do we need to be informed on the many great advancements that the are doing but how it effect us. With Atomwise getting this funding it will mean that there is going to be great leaps with it comes to working to understand what is occurring inside humans but more so how to fix the problem so that as a whole we are able to advance. This is going to be one of the first steps to many more great advancements in making sure that all fields of medicine are going to be treated this way.