Envisagenics, a biotechnology company that applies Artificial Intelligence to the genetic sequence of patients to discover new therapies, has raised USD2.35 million in a seed funding round.
The investors include Third Kind Venture Capital (3KVC), Cosine, LLC (NYC biotech investors), Dolby Family Ventures, Dynamk Capital, NY Empire State Development (ESD), and SV Angel.
Envisagenics’ proprietary discovery platform, SpliceCoreTM, can identify new ribonucleic acid (RNA) targets and design new drugs to correct RNA splicing errors in cancer and genetic diseases. Envisagenics launched their commercial product, SpliceCore, at Unboxing on 19 October, 2017, featuring pitches and demos from Peter Thiel’s Breakout Labs portfolio companies and has been invited to demo the platform at the Technology for Precision Health Summit on 12 December, 2017.
Envisagenics is one of the first life science companies selected to receive investment from the New York State Innovation Venture Capital Fund administered by Empire State Development, a USD100 million fund established in 2014 to promote commercialisation of new technologies and drive economic growth.
“It is great to have the support of established female investors with the experience to scale companies and accelerate drug discovery. It’s exciting to be part of changing the landscape of venture investments in female founders” says Dr Maria Luisa Pineda, co-founder and CEO of Envisagenics. Daniella Kranjac, co-founder and managing director of Dynamk Capital, who led the seed round of Envisagenics said, “Envisagenics is disrupting traditional drug discovery through applied machine learning and AI. We are excited to see the commercialisation of SpliceCore enable biopharma leaders to accelerate critical discovery efforts for life-saving therapeutics.”
Envisagenics SpliceCore is a cloud-based platform that uses machine learning to prioritise new drug target candidates from patients’ RNA, our genetic blueprint. Envisagenics focuses on RNA splicing, a cellular process occurring in every cell, that ‘edits’ RNA to produce functional proteins required for our body to work.
