Recursion Secures $50 Million Investment from NVIDIA to Accelerate AI-Enabled Drug Discovery

Rare Daily Staff

Recursion, a leading clinical stage company seeking to industrialize drug discovery through the use of artificial intelligence, said it secured a $50 million investment from NVIDIA through a private sale of equity.

Recursion also said it plans to accelerate development of its AI foundation models for biology and chemistry, which, in collaboration with NVIDIA, it intends to optimize and distribute to biotechnology companies using NVIDIA cloud services.

“Our collaboration with NVIDIA represents two best-in-class companies coming together to help solve one of the world’s most difficult challenges, drug discovery,” said Chris Gibson, co-founder and CEO of Recursion. “With our powerful dataset and NVIDIA’s accelerated computing capabilities, we intend to create groundbreaking foundation models in biology and chemistry at a scale unlike anything that has ever been released in the biological space.”

The company said it will utilize its proprietary biological and chemical dataset, which exceeds 23 petabytes and 3 trillion searchable gene and compound relationships, to accelerate the training of foundation models on NVIDIA DGX Cloud for possible commercial license/release on BioNeMo, NVIDIA’s cloud service for generative AI in drug discovery.

NVIDIA will also help optimize and scale Recursion foundation models leveraging the NVIDIA AI stack and NVIDIA’s full-stack computing expertise.

NVIDIA unvieled BioNeMo earlier this year as a cloud service for generative AI in drug discovery, offering tools to quickly customize and deploy domain-specific, state-of-the-art biomolecular models at-scale through cloud APIs. Recursion anticipates using this software to support its internal pipeline as well as its current and future partners.

Recursion, through its recent acquisition of Valence Discovery, aims to accelerate the development of new technologies to feed the biopharma industry, while simultaneously democratizing access to large-scale models that have maximum impact in drug discovery.

Photo: Chris Gibson, co-founder and CEO of Recursion