Insitro founder and CEO Daphne Koller. Photo credit: James Duncan Davidson/TED, under Creative Commons license

Insitro, a San Francisco-based drug discovery startup, has announced $143 million in Series B funding led by venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, with participation from the likes of Canada Pension Plan Investment Board, T. Rowe Price, BlackRock,  Alphabet’s GV, Two Sigma Ventures, and Third Rock Ventures. Under the terms of the financing, Vijay Pande, a partner at Andreessen Horowitz, has taken a board seat at Insitro.

Insitro says it’ll put the new funding towards building out its drug discovery technology, pursuing new drug discoveries, R&D, and establishing new partnerships. With this funding, Insitro has now raised a total of $243 million in equity financing since its inception.

Insitro is one of a series of drug discovery startups that have emerged recently and are capitalizing on the growth of machine learning techniques and resources globally. Basically, Insitro’s work entails harnessing machine learning and data engineering techniques to help in drug discovery and research. The company’s primary customers are pharmaceutical companies that normally spend sizeable sums on research and development. Other notable startups doing similar work to Insitro’s include the likes of Recursion Pharmaceuticals, Nimbus Therapeutics, BenevolentAI, and Atomwise.

Insitro formally launched in 2018 with a $100 million Series A financing round from famed investors including Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, Mubadala, Andreessen Horowitz, and Two Sigma Ventures. The company was founded by Daphne Koller, a technology veteran best known for being a former Professor of computer science at Stanford University as well as a co-founder of popular education platform Coursera. Before founding Insitro, Koller was the chief computing officer of Calico, an offshoot of tech giant Alphabet that does research work on anti-aging and associated conditions.

After co-founding Coursera, which was valued at more than $1 billion from its last known financing round, Koller has apparently scored another big hit with Insitro, which has raised a very sizeable amount of financing despite being a relatively young company.

Insitro’s valuation with this Series B funding isn’t disclosed.