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news.BenevolentAI has secured $115m funding to advance drug development activities and extend its artificial intelligence (AI) platform capabilities.
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The company has raised the funding from new and existing investors at a pre-money valuation of $2bn in the financing round of the AI pharmaceutical sector.
From 2013, BenevolentAI has raised over $200m from most of the US investors and existing investors such as Woodford Investment Management.
BenevolentAI, which will use the funding to speed up drug development, already initiated over 20 drug programmes to date.
BenevolentAI founder and chairman Ken Mulvany said: “We are very pleased with the response to the fundraising. It reflects the rapidly growing global interest in the AI pharmaceutical sector and the recognition of our place as the dominant player within it.”
The company will also use funding to expand its AI capabilities into other science-based industries such as advanced materials, agriculture, and energy storage.
The firm is using AI for the development of new medicines for hard to treat diseases. It is claimed to be the first fully integrated AI company with pharmaceutical discovery and clinical development capabilities.
BenevolentAI’s advanced technology can decode the molecular process of disease and link these disease signatures within patients, helping to select best drug candidate for the best patient responders.
The company's current drug development portfolio shows that it can cut early stage drug discovery by four years and deliver efficiencies in the entire drug development process of 60% against pharmaceutical industry averages.
The firm’s advanced algorithms hold capacity to carry out reasoning on more than 50 billion ingested and contextualised facts to extract knowledge and generate complex insights into the cause of diseases.
Its AI technology is being used to develop treatments for a range of diseases such as motor neuron disease, Parkinson’s disease, glioblastoma and sarcopenia.
Semi-automatic novel drug molecules are generated, which were later advanced in the firm’s newly acquired Cambridge research facility in the UK.