Formation Bio Inc., a startup using artificial intelligence to speed up drug development, today announced that it has closed a mammoth $372 million investment. 

Andreessen Horowitz led the Series D funding round. It was joined by pharmaceutical company Sanofi SA and more than a half-dozen other investors. The valuation at which Formation Bio closed the round is described as a “material step up” from the $1 billion it was worth following its previous raise, a $156 million investment that closed in 2021.

“Pharma represents one of the biggest industries in the world, and there is immense potential to make the drug development process more efficient,” said Andreessen Horowitz managing partner Scott Kupor.

Drug development projects begin with a drug candidate, a molecule that shows promise at treating a certain medical condition. The process of turning such a molecule into medicine can often take more than a decade of research and billions of dollars. New York-based Formation Bio promises to streamline the process.

The company acquires or licenses candidate molecules from fellow drugmakers and takes over the subsequent medicine development process. According to Formation Bio, its researchers can run clinical trials significantly faster than other market players. The company uses AI to speed up some of the manual work historically involved in the workflow.

One of the tasks that Formation Bio promises to streamline is the process of recruiting patients for clinical trials. According to the company, traditional approaches to recruiting study participants can leave drugmakers with incomplete patient data. Formation Bio has developed a data management system called Universal Data Platform that it says addresses the challenge.

The company also promises to ease several related tasks. According to Formation Bio, its Universal Data Platform simplifies the process of detecting and removing unnecessary information that may find its way into clinical datasets. Additionally, the software helps researchers validate the accuracy of the remaining records.

The new funding round will be used to acquire more drug candidates and enhance its platform’s AI features. According to Formation Bio, its near-term goal is to develop machine learning tools that can automatically generate content such as patient recruitment documents. Down the road, it plans to train AI research assistants capable of automating certain drug development tasks for its clinical teams. 

The company’s latest capital infusion comes a few weeks after it inked a technical partnership with Sanofi and OpenAI. The collaboration will see the trio develop AI models optimized for pharmaceutical research tasks. According to the companies, the goal is to find ways of speeding up the drug development process. 

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