November 29, 2024

Boulder’s Enveda closes $130M raise to bolster AI-power drug discovery platform

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BOULDER — On the heels of a major fundraising effort this summer, Boulder-based Enveda Biosciences, which uses machine learning to discover naturally occurring drug compounds, recently closed on a $130 million Series C round. 

“The way we’ve this capital fundraiser has been set up is to definitely take us to that next level with our clinical pipeline,” Enveda chief of staff Daniel Wee told BizWest. “This is a huge milestone, not just from the size of the round, but also for what it means for the next kind of inflection point for Enveda.”

Enveda Biosciences, also known as Enveda Therapeutics Inc., has 10 drug candidates in its development pipeline, including an oral anti-inflammatory therapy for atopic dermatitis that recently began clinical trials.

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“Some of the world’s greatest pharmaceutical breakthroughs have been derived from just 0.1% of nature’s chemistry,” Enveda CEO Viswa Colluru said in a prepared statement. “We developed our platform to rapidly expand access to nature’s chemistry to find therapeutics at roughly four times the speed–and it’s already delivering results in the form of a deep and differentiated pipeline.”

Enveda used artificial intelligence to develop a “sequencer for life’s chemistry,” the company said. The platform “combines metabolomics data with machine learning and high-throughput biological experiments to answer two fundamental questions of any natural sample at scale: ‘What are the molecules?,’ and ‘What do they do?’”

The roughly 5-year-old company, which wrapped up a $119 million Series B fundraising round in June, has about 250 employees across the globe, including at Enveda’s Asian headquarters in Hyderabad, India.

The company’s North American operations are based out of a 60,000-square-foot facility in Boulder’s Flatiron Park business campus. 

“Boulder has a lot of companies that have shown success before, and has built up a strong ecosystem around the life sciences,” Wee said. “… There are these (biotechnology) hubs that exist across the country, like San Francisco and Cambridge, (Massachusetts). But as the pandemic happened, we saw that actually the ball was moving towards areas (such as Boulder) where people wanted to live and experience a different lifestyle.”

Investors in Enveda’s Series C round included Baillie Gifford, Premji Invest, Lingotto Innovation, Lux Capital, Dimension Capital, True Ventures, Cresset Partners, The Nature Conservancy and Henry R. Kravis.

Founded in 2019, Enveda has raised a total of $360 million from investors.

“Drug development takes a long time and a lot of money,” Wee said. Enveda is a pre-revenue company, but “we think we’re putting ourselves in a very opportune place to have that within reach very soon.”

On the heels of a major fundraising effort this summer, Boulder-based Enveda Biosciences, which uses machine learning to discover naturally occurring drug compounds, recently closed on a $130 million Series C round. 

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A Maryland native, Lucas has worked at news agencies from Wyoming to South Carolina before putting roots down in Colorado.
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