Biotech’s Latest Unicorn Uses AI To Mine Nature’s Medicine Chest
The big idea, Chief Executive Officer Viswa Colluru said, is to pick up where evolution left off.
Nature is a prolific pharmacist. Aspirin, the blood thinner warfarin and metformin for diabetes all trace back to plants, discovered by serendipity before being transformed into drugs by modern chemistry.
Biotech’s latest unicorn, the closely held firm Enveda, wants to shave a few centuries off the journey from nature to the medicine cabinet, using artificial intelligence to scour thousands of plants for potential next breakthroughs.
That promise helped the Boulder, Colorado, company close a $150 million Series D, Enveda said Thursday, lifting its valuation above $1 billion and bringing its total venture funding to $517 million. Enveda, founded in 2019, has already enrolled the first patient in its inaugural clinical trial, and it expects to move two more drugs into human studies in the months ahead.
The big idea, Chief Executive Officer Viswa Colluru said, is to pick up where evolution left off.
Enveda began with some 38,000 plants found to have medicinal uses throughout human history, with the list subsequently winnowed down to roughly 12,000 that have persisted across cultures and continents. From there, the company breaks each into its microscopic component parts and feeds the results into its proprietary AI program, analyzing the fragments to figure out which might be responsible for the beneficial effects.
The most promising molecules are identified and run through more conventional laboratory paces, to refine areas like potency and tolerability, and turn them into potential drugs.
“We’re combining ancient ancestral wisdom with the power of nature’s chemistry with modern AI and drug discovery,” Colluru said. “We’re standing on the shoulders of maybe the giant, which is Mother Nature.”
The pitch worked on Mikael Dolsten, who recently retired after more than 15 years leading research at Pfizer Inc. He was involved with a similar quest decades ago, when researchers extracted the transplant medicine rapamycin from the soils of Easter Island. The challenge was that for every compound like rapamycin, there were countless experiments that failed to discern drugs from dirt, Dolsten said.
“Visiting Enveda and looking at this state-of-the-art equipment they put in place opened a new world,” said Dolsten, who has joined the company’s board. “What was before a hurdle can now be turned into an opportunity.”
It will be years before investors know whether the approach will pay off. It can take a decade to get a new drug from early testing to approval, and the vast majority of novel medicines fail along the way.
Still, the optimism surrounding artificial intelligence has spread to Enveda. It’s funding round comes as private biotech companies are struggling to raise cash. Venture dollars for biotech firms fell by more than 30% sequentially in the second quarter, according to an HSBC report, as the threat of pharmaceutical tariffs and regulatory upheaval sends investors looking for safer shores.
Enveda’s first drug, a pill now entering human studies, traces its roots to a plant that has a long history of treating symptoms of asthma and eczema, Colluru said. Behind it are two more medicines slated for clinical trials, including an oral weight-loss treatment Colluru believes could become “the first statin for obesity.”
Thanks to a Colorado warehouse full of 12,000 plant samples, Enveda expects to quadruple its pipeline in the coming months, he said.
“Nobody in the field would say natural products don’t have potential,” he said. “But everyone has shied away because there hasn’t been the technology to systematize the serendipity. We’re changing that.”
