Valo Health, a US-based developer of drug discovery technology, closed its series B round at $300m yesterday with $110m from Koch Disruptive Technologies, a subsidiary of chemicals and industrial group Koch Industries.
The $190m first close was led by Canadian pension fund manager Public Sector Pension Investment Board (PSP Investments) in January this year and included Flagship Pioneering, Invus Public Equities, HBM Healthcare Investments, Atinum Investment and Mirae Asset Capital.
Founded in 2019, Valo leverages machine learning technology and human-focused data across the drug discovery and development process, with the aim of cutting development time and reducing expense. It has already been used to discover new links between genetic markers and disease.
The series B funds have been earmarked for the further development of the startup’s Opal Computational Platform in addition to building a therapeutic pipeline initially concentrating on cancer and neurodegenerative and cardiovascular diseases.
The company raised $100m from PSP Investments and company builder Flagship Pioneering in July 2019, Forbes reported in September 2020, and it said this week its total funding now stands at over $450m. Its founder and chief executive, David Berry, is a general partner at Flagship Pioneering.
Berry said: “We are reimagining the process of discovering and developing life-changing drugs in potentially half the time, at half the cost, and with fewer failures, and we are proud that KDT recognises our paradigm-changing work.
“This investment and their partnership will help us further scale and accelerate our goals and the Opal platform.”
