Atomwise Raises $6 Million

What does Atomwise do?

Atomwise , is a drug discovery platform which uses Deep Learning Neural Networks for discovering new medicines. It achieves the world’s best results for binding affinity prediction, new drug hit discovery and toxicity detection. This company predicts drug candidates for pharmaceutical companies, research institutions and startups. Medicines are becoming more expensive to develop.  It takes around $1.8B and 15 years for developing one new drug. Atomwise aims to change this via supercomputers from predicting in advance, which medicines will work and which will not.

Its tools can tell the difference between toxic ones and good drug candidates and discovers new uses for the old drugs. It uses the AI breakthroughs which power self driving cars, online search and virtual assistants and put them for work for human health. thus, there is lesser requirement for test tubes, experiments and failed drugs. So better medicines develop faster.

How much Atomwise was funded?

Atomwise raised $6M in Seed round on June 3^rd, 2015 from OS Fund, Draper Fisher Jurvetson (DFJ), AME Cloud Ventures, Khosla Ventures, Draper Associates , Data Collective and other angel investors.

Previous funding

$120k in Seed funding on December 1, 2014 from Y Combinator

$225k  in Seed funding on March 1, 2015

What is next for Atomwise?

Atomwise will use the funding for dig more into artificial intelligence and to speed up the process in discovering new drugs. The company’s goal is finding cures for both common and orphan diseases, which would otherwise be very expensive and time intensive to take on. The company has worked with IBM and other institutions and has launched more than 12 projects dealing everything from ebola to multiple sclerosis. It announced its collaboration with Harvard Medical School, Notable Labs and Merck.

More about Atomwise

Atomwise was founded in 2012 by Dr. Izhar Wallach, Dr. Abraham Heifets  and Alexander Levy. It has its headquarters in San Francisco, California.