XtalPi Takes Drug Development into the Next Frontier with $318.8 Million Series C

 

XtalPi Inc., an AI-based pharmaceutical technology company with an AI-powered platform that twins with existing R&D pipelines, now has $318.8 million more to bring drug development into the future.

Leading the Series C financing round were SoftBank’s Vision Fund 2, Morningside Venture Capital and PICC Capital.  Morningside is one of China’s earliest early-stage venture investors, while Softbank Vision Fund’s health portfolio includes Biofourmis, which focuses on AI-based remote patient monitoring and 10x Genomics who is broadening the application of genomic information.

Existing investors Tencent, Sequoia China, China Life and SIG showed their continued faith in the company, signing back on for this round. 

“We believe AI holds the answer to solving pharma’s productivity challenge. More specifically, XtalPi’s AI-powered platform can improve the industry’s research efficiency and success rate in order to lower costs for discovering and developing new drugs,” XtalPi Chairman and co-founder Dr. Shuhao Wen said in a statement.

“In the past few years, we have focused on developing and validating our platform’s capabilities by working with some of the top innovative pharmaceutical and biotech companies in the world,” Wen said. “As an advocate and trailblazer in AI drug discovery, our investors and we are heartened by several of our AI drug discovery collaborations that reached milestones in significantly shortened timeframes.”

XtalPi’s novel technology is reimagining R&D for faster and more streamlined development and expedited time to market for drugs focused on unmet needs, such as partner PhoreMost Ltd’s “undruggable” disease targets.  The two companies entered into a contract to defeat cancer on September 8, hoping to reach one of Wen’s stated milestones.

“This alliance marks an exciting chapter in PhoreMost’s development, as we now seek to rapidly progress our internal portfolio of novel first-in-class targets into drug discovery,” PhoreMost CEO Dr. Chris Torrance said in a statement. 

The Intelligent Digital Drug Discovery and Development (ID4) platform is a trilogy of AI, high-performance cloud computing algorithms, and tightly interwoven quantum physics. It promises increased efficiency and accuracy in drug development.  

Included among XtalPi’s services is crystal structure prediction (CSP) for small molecule drug candidates, which accelerates solid-state research and eliminates risk in late-stage development. 

The ID4 platform provides intelligent advantages for small molecule drug design. With high-throughput screening, de novo design and structural simplification, hits are identified, generated into leads and finally optimized on the road to becoming clinical drug candidates.