Enveda Secures $55 Million To Integrate Ancient Remedies With AI for Drug Discovery

On Thursday, Enveda announced that it has secured a $55 million Series B extension from new investors to integrate ancient remedies with AI to discover new drugs.

The latest funding round, which brings Enveda’s total capital to $230 million, has contributions from new investors such as Microsoft, The Nature Conservancy, Premji Invest, and Lingotto Investment Fund. The existing investors, including Kinnevik, True Ventures, FPV, Level Ventures, and Jazz Venture Partners, also participated, providing a significant boost to the company.

Centuries ago, chewing willow tree bark was a remedy for pain relief. However, it wasn’t until the 1800s that scientists at chemical firm Bayer identified and isolated its active ingredient. This breakthrough resulted in the creation and patenting of a modified form now recognized as aspirin.

This is just one example of medications born from natural origins. According to the World Health Organization, approximately 40% of contemporary pharmaceuticals trace their origins to traditional remedies.

Despite the evident achievements in leveraging nature’s resources, scientists believe they have only scratched the surface in discovering the vast range of natural chemical compounds that hold the potential for powerful medicinal use.

Testing and isolating molecules from nature involves a more complex process compared to synthesizing new compounds in a controlled laboratory environment.

Viswa Colluru, an early team member at Recursion Pharmaceuticals, advocates for using AI and other advanced techniques to accelerate the discovery of new medicines stemming from natural sources. Colluru departed Recursion in 2019 to launch Enveda Biosciences, a biotech company based in Boulder, Colorado. Enveda specializes in analyzing plant chemistry to uncover potential medicinal compounds.

In an interview with TechCrunch, Colluru explained that Enveda utilizes global digital data on traditional plant usage across cultures to explore their potential for treating pain and diseases.

He said, “We discovered that geographically separated cultures from across the world were much more likely to use similar plants for similar diseases and symptoms, even though they never talked to each other. They discovered that a certain plant helps stomach ache, or a certain plant helps like a fever or a headache, and that is literally thousands  of years of experiential human wisdom.”

Currently, Enveda’s database contains information on 38,000 medicinal plants associated with around 12,000 diseases and symptoms.

Enveda utilizes AI to pinpoint plants with the greatest potential for therapeutic benefits. Once identified, these plants are harvested and tested using the company’s advanced AI model. Enveda’s transformer model decodes the holistic “chemical language” of entire samples, a departure from traditional methods that typically focus on individual molecules.

Colluru said, “Once we know their shape, we can prioritize the right sets of molecules and say, this will one day be a medicine.”