The Boulder biotech says its platform finds viable drug candidates four times faster at a tenth of the cost. The new money will take a post-GLP-1 weight pill and two other drugs further into human trials.
Enveda, a privately held biotechnology company that uses artificial intelligence to find medicines in plants and microbes, has doubled its valuation to about $2 billion in a new funding round.
Healthcare investor Catalio Capital Management led the round alongside technology funds including Iconiq, which counts former Johnson & Johnson Chief Executive Alex Gorsky among its backers. The Boulder, Colo.-based company did not disclose the size of the raise. It said the money will fund later-stage human trials.
Enveda's platform, called Prism, identifies and ranks therapeutic compounds found in nature and predicts their structures and biological functions. The company says the system has produced 17 drug candidates since 2019 and can identify commercially viable molecules roughly four times faster and at one-tenth the cost of traditional methods.
"The industry has gotten really, really good at commercializing a molecule once you know it's right, but has increasingly gotten worse at finding the right molecule," said Chief Executive Viswa Colluru. "We're letting AI lead the way for answers that already exist in nature."
The pipeline gives the valuation something concrete to rest on. Enveda's most closely watched program is an experimental daily pill designed to help patients keep weight off after they stop taking GLP-1 drugs. The company said it found the compound by decoding the chemistry the body releases during intense exercise, identifying a hormone that naturally suppresses appetite. The drug is expected to begin mid-stage testing soon.
Enveda is also developing a pill for atopic dermatitis that cleared patients' skin in an early-stage trial, and a drug for inflammatory bowel disease that is in Phase 1 testing. The company has expanded its leadership over the past year, including hiring Novo Nordisk's former head of disease prevention.
For investors in AI-driven drug discovery, Enveda's round offers a useful marker. The sector's promise rests on speeding up the earliest, most failure-prone stage of drug development. The payoff still depends on clinical results.
The mid-stage weight-maintenance trial is the next milestone. It will be the first chance to see whether a molecule found by Enveda's platform performs in a larger group of patients, which is the test that decides whether a $2 billion valuation reflects a discovery engine or a single promising drug.