Inductive Bio Nets $25 Million to Predict Better Drugs with AI

Inductive Bio, a New York-based startup, has announced a $25 million Series A funding round aimed at transforming small molecule drug discovery through advanced artificial intelligence. The round was led by Obvious Ventures, with participation from prominent investors including Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) Bio + Health, Lux Capital, S32, Character, and Amino Collective. Notable angel investors such as Oren Etzioni, Jeff Hammerbacher, Malay Gandhi, and Jakob Uszkoreit also contributed to the funding.

Addressing the Bottlenecks in Drug Discovery

The pharmaceutical industry faces mounting challenges, including escalating costs, prolonged development timelines, and increasing competition. A critical hurdle in preclinical drug development is optimising a compound’s ADMET properties: absorption, distribution, metabolism, excretion, and toxicity. Traditional methods to assess these properties are time-consuming and resource-intensive, often leading to delays and increased expenses.

Inductive Bio tackles this issue head-on with its AI-powered Compass platform. By predicting ADMET properties before a molecule is synthesised, Compass enables chemists to prioritise compounds with the highest likelihood of success, thereby streamlining the drug development process.

Harnessing Collective Intelligence 

Inductive Bio’s approach is a pre-competitive data consortium. This collaborative model allows multiple companies to contribute anonymised data in a secure, IP-protected environment. The aggregated dataset enhances the training of AI models, enabling more accurate predictions across diverse chemical spaces. The company’s Beacon-1 model exemplifies the power of this approach. In the Polaris ADMET competition, Beacon-1 outperformed 38 other models from leading AI drug discovery companies and academic institutions, demonstrating its superior predictive capabilities. 

Real-World Impact 

Since its launch, Compass has supported dozens of active small-molecule drug programs across various therapeutic areas. Medicinal chemists have explored over 1 million molecule designs using the platform. In collaboration with Nested Therapeutics, Inductive Bio’s technology contributed to the nomination of a drug development candidate with excellent cell potency and cross-species pharmacokinetics.

The newly secured funding will enable Inductive Bio to expand its AI model research and development, grow its data consortium, and deploy its technology industry-wide. The company also plans to launch an AI-native contract research organisation (CRO) to further democratise access to its cutting-edge tools. 

“Traditional approaches for optimising drug molecules are like playing a complex game of ‘whack-a-mole’ with dramatic consequences for the success or failure of a therapeutic program,” said Josh Haimson, co-founder and CEO of Inductive Bio. “Our platform’s pre-competitive consortium allows the entire industry to benefit from the rapid advances being made in AI, dramatically accelerating the path to life-changing therapies.”

With this infusion of capital and a robust collaborative framework, Inductive Bio is poised to redefine the landscape of drug discovery, making the development of effective therapies faster, more efficient, and more accessible.