Accelerated drug discovery and development platform Converge Bio Inc. today announced it has raised $25 million in early-stage funding to develop better drugs for pharmaceutical companies and open up opportunities in the industry using artificial intelligence.
Bessemer Venture Partners led the Series A round, with participation from TLV Partners, Vintage Investment Partners, Saras Capital, as well as executives from Meta Platforms Inc., OpenAI Group PBC and Wiz. Today’s round brings the total capital raised by the company to more than $30 million, including $5.5 seed funding raised in 2024.
Google LLC’s AlphaFold developers won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry a year ago, proving that AI drug discovery has unprecedented potential. In October, major American pharma company Eli Lily and Co. partnered with Nvidia Corp. to build the pharmaceutical industry’s most powerful AI supercomputer for drug discovery.
Despite all this work, Converge Bio argues there’s still significant work to be done to make AI a sufficient workhorse in comparison with traditional elbow grease.
“The conversation needs to shift from models to AI systems,” said co-founder and Chief Executive Dov Gertz. “Unlike ChatGPT, you can’t simply prompt a model and get useful results. There’s a long road from a model that performs well on benchmarks to an AI system a biologist can actually use. It requires high-quality data, the right architectures for the domain, and a tight experimental validation loop.”
According to Gertz, a vast majority of drug development still happens in labs, cooking over test tubes, through trial and error, taking years and hundreds of millions of dollars.
Converge is attempting to solve this problem by combining multiple proprietary models and plugging them directly into development workflows, thus providing actionable outputs and results. This system can furnish novel drug targets, optimized antibody candidates and protein sequences for increased yields without the need to write additional code or complex infrastructure.
The company said its approach is already delivering results across multiple therapeutic areas, including cancer research, neurovegetative disorders and autoimmune diseases. In the past year, Converge completed over 40 programs with pharmaceutical and biotech companies.
“Our goal is simple: Make every biotech and pharma company an AI company,” said Gertz.
Source: Pixabay
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