Artificial intelligence drug discovery startup Atomwise Inc. announced today it has raised $123 million in new funding to scale up its AI technology platform.

The Series B round was led by B Capital Group and Sanabil Investments and included DCVC, BV, Tencent, Y Combinator, Dolby Ventures, AME Cloud Ventures and two unnamed top 10 global insurance companies.

Founded in 2012, Atomwise uses AI and machine learning algorithms on supercomputers to analyze data related to the creation of new drug molecules. The company uses a neural network called AtomNet to analyze more than 100 million compounds daily to reduce the time and cost involved in drug discovery. The AI is also designed to make predictions about the effectiveness of compounds and possible side effects.

AtomNet claims to improve hit rates by up to 10,000 times with an accuracy comparable to wet lab experiments, those in a laboratory where drugs are handled in liquid solutions for testing purposes. The neural network technology is compared by Atomwise to facial recognition and self-driving cars with a statistical approach that extracts the insights from millions of experimental affinity measurements and thousands of protein structures to predict the binding of small molecules to proteins

Atomwise’s technology is used by some of the biggest companies in the biopharma market, including Eli Lilly and Company, Bayer AG, Jiangsu Hansoh Pharmaceutical Group Co. Ltd. and Bridge Biotherapeutics Inc., as well as emerging biotechnology companies such as StemoniX Inc. and SEngine Precision Medicine Inc. The company also has 285 active drug discovery partnerships with researchers at universities around the world.

Atomwise also claims 15 research collaborations with global universities to explore broad-spectrum therapies for COVID-19, targeting 15 unique mechanisms of action.

“Over the past three years, AtomNet has tackled — and succeeded — in finding small molecule hits for more undruggable targets than any other AI drug discovery platform,” Abraham Heifets, co-founder and chief executive officer of Atomwise, said in a statement. “With support from our new and existing investment partners, we will be able to leverage this to develop our own pipeline of small molecule drug programs, further grow our portfolio of joint-venture investments and realize our vision to create better medicines that can improve the lives of billions of people.”

Including the new funding, Atomwise has raised $174.3 million to date. Its last funding round was in March 2018.

Image: Atomwise