XtalPi raises $319m for AI based drug research and development

XtalPi, a pharma company that leverages artificial intelligence (AI) for drug discovery and development, has raised $318.8 million in a Series C round.

The funding round was co-led by SoftBank Vision Fund 2i, PICC Capital, and Morningside.

It saw the participation of more than 12 global investment firms in banking and technology, while existing investors – Tencent, China Life, Sequoia China, and SIG made follow-on investments.

XtalPi said that the new round of funding will help it bring the power of quantum physics, AI, and nearly limitless cloud resources to drive research scientists towards drug candidates with customized pharmaceutical profiles.

The company’s platform is said to combine physics-based and data-driven models to address all drug properties pertaining to progression into clinical studies.

Eric Chen – Managing Partner at SoftBank Investment Advisers said: “We believe XtalPi is a leader in transforming drug discovery through its innovative multi-disciplinary approach.

“Using a combination of quantum physics, AI and cloud computing, XtalPi’s technology platform is improving the efficiency and accuracy of drug research and development. We are pleased to support their mission to build healthier societies around the world.”

Through the integration of the predictions of its virtual R&D platform with real-world data from modern laboratories, XtalPi plans to develop a digital-twin drug R&D system to offer a scalable and sustainable advantage that can lead to more potential drug candidates with lesser experiments in less time.

Dr. Shuhao Wen – chairman and co-founder at XtalPi said: “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.

“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.”

“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, as part of its next steps, will grow the capabilities of its Intelligent Digital Drug Discovery and Development (ID4) platform by means of a three-pronged approach, which will be focused on algorithms, data, and computing power to address efficiency bottlenecks right through the crucial steps of pharmaceutical research.