- General
- September 29, 2020
- 4 minutes read
XtalPi Bags $319 Million Round
XtalPi XtalPi, an AI drug discovery startup with operations in both the US and China, has announced that it’s secured…
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| XtalPi |
XtalPi, an AI drug discovery startup with operations in both the US and China, has announced that it’s secured a $319 million Series C funding round co-led by SoftBank Vision Fund 2 along with investment firms Morningside and PICC Capital. Other participants in the round include existing investors Tencent, Sequoia Capital China, SIG, and China Life, with the total participants in the round numbering over a dozen. With the new funding, XtalPi, which was founded in 2014, has now raised a total of nearly $400 million in funding since its inception. Before now, the company’s most recent financing was a $46 million Series B extension round raised in October of 2018.
XtalPi harnesses artificial intelligence and physics processes to build prediction algorithms that help research scientists to identify drug candidates. The company has garnered a high amount of clinical data that helps to predict and model the interaction between molecules and proteins at the atomic level and also map various feature vectors of a compound to key pharmacology properties. Think of XtalPi as a virtual R&D platform for pharmaceutical companies.
XtalPi says it’ll use its new capital to expand and better build out its drug discovery platform. Supporting the company’s operations are a team of multi-disciplinary experts in areas such as physics, chemistry, pharmaceutical R&D, and algorithm design, including the company’s founders who were a team of quantum physicists at the famed Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).
XtalPi is one of several drug discovery startups to have raised huge amounts of funding. Among its cohort include several other popular names such as Recursion Pharmaceuticals, which is itself fresh off $239 million in Series D funding.
