SoftBank Ventures, an early-stage investment vehicle for telecommunications group SoftBank, led a $10 series A round yesterday for US-based drug discovery technology developer TwoXar.
Venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz also contributed to the round, through its Bio Fund, as did VC fund OS Fund. The company has previously raised $4.3m in seed funding from Bio Fund, Stanford-Start X Fund and CLI Ventures in 2014,
Founded in 2014, TwoXar has developed a pharmaceutical discovery platform that relies on artificial intelligence (AI) technology to reduce the time it takes to identify drug candidates from years to weeks.
The company has entered collaboration agreements with multiple biopharmaceutical firms, drug developers and investors to generate a pipeline of drug candidates, focusing on diseases such as liver cancer, rheumatoid arthritis and type 2 diabetes.
The series A funding will go toward expanding the pipeline and accelerating preclinical development of existing candidates. JP Lee, managing director at SoftBank Ventures, and Vijay Pande, general partner at Andreessen Horowitz, have joined TwoXar’s board of directors.
Lee said: “The company’s AI-driven discovery platform has the potential to transform the identification of new medicines and dramatically improve the success rates of preclinical development.
“The TwoXar team has already established a number of collaborations with global biopharmaceutical leaders and demonstrated how candidates identified by their technology translate to successful in vivo studies.”
– The original version of this article appeared on our sister site, Global University Venturing.