BenevolentAI claims to have raised $115 million. Ken Mulvaney, founder and executive chairman of the company, said the funding came from an undisclosed consortium that included family businesses and strategic investors, mostly from the United States, and not "traditional venture capital."
The new funding will be used to expand drug development projects, broaden key disease areas, and extend their platform capabilities – not only in the pharmaceutical sector, but also in materials science, energy and agriculture.
According to BenevolentAI, this round of financing is by far the largest in the artificial intelligence pharmaceutical industry. This is not surprising given that the industry is in its infancy and that the technology in the industry is relatively new.
The London-based company was founded in 2013 and currently has a total financing of more than $200 million and a valuation of $2 billion. Investors include Woodford Investment Management, Lundbeck and Lansdowne Partners. The identity of some investors has not been disclosed.
Core business: "AI brain"
The core business of BenevolentAI is the “brain†built by the team of scientists described by Mulvaney. The “brains†were created to capture and calculate billions of data points in specific areas such as health and materials science, helping scientists better develop the ultimate solution that could solve the continuing challenges in medicine and other areas.
Mulvaney wrote in his blog: This artificial intelligence "brain" with 50 billion biometric data points and complex biological concepts - the world's largest and most complex bioscience knowledge map, can make us on a scale that humans cannot reach. New insights into the causes of the disease.
For example, the crux of the drug development problem is that even if scientists can identify the arrangement and type of a particular cancer cell, each cancer cell will mutate. And this has not taken into account that mutations will behave differently in different individuals.
AI technology with powerful computing and learning capabilities can help solve such problems. (BenevolventAI is not the only company that uses AI technology to solve this type of problem, and Grail and Paige.A have adopted it in cancer.)
Rich product pipeline
Even though AI technology is growing fast, it is still a long time for BenevolentAI to achieve its goal.
Under the leadership of GSK veteran Jackie Hunter, BenevolentAI is traversing 22 research drugs including Parkinson's syndrome, Alzheimer's disease, motor neuron disease, glioblastoma and muscle atrophy. After several years of hard work, one of the drugs used to treat Parkinson has now entered Phase 2b clinical trials.
Mulvaney said that there is currently a research drug for the treatment of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), which is expected to significantly improve the treatment prospects of patients with ALS, and it will take about 5 years to be used in clinical trials. Despite this, the best ALS drugs on the market today can only prolong the life of patients for about 3 months, which is still worth trying.
This financing brings leaps and bounds
Recently, the company acquired a drug research and development building at the Babraham Research Campus at the University of Cambridge, UK, adding a research team and late clinical testing capabilities. Mulvaney said he hopes to grow the team size from 155 to 300 by the end of the year.
“We have gone a long way since our inception in 2013. Six years ago, such technology was still in vain.†Mulvaney said, “This fund has expanded our scale and capabilities overnight and created some that did not exist before. Something – an artificial intelligence company is truly integrated into every stage of the drug development process.â€
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