AI biotech Enveda raises $311 million Series E, doubling valuation to about $2 billion

Enveda Biosciences, a biotechnology company that uses artificial intelligence to search for new drugs in natural compounds, announced on September 23 that it has closed a $311 million Series E funding round. The round was led by Catalio Capital Management and roughly doubles the company's valuation to about $2 billion, up from roughly half that a year ago.

Enveda was founded in 2019 on the idea that plants, fungi and other organisms have already evolved a vast library of chemical compounds that could become medicines, most of which have never been systematically catalogued. The company built an AI model called PRISM, trained on more than a billion mass spectrometry readings, to help identify which of those natural compounds might affect human biology and to predict their chemical structures.

Enveda has developed 17 drug candidates in total, three of which are already in human testing. The new funding will help advance three of them: ENV-294, a mid-stage treatment for eczema and asthma currently in Phase II trials that the company plans to move into later-stage studies; ENV-308, a pill designed to help people maintain weight loss after stopping GLP-1 drugs, which reported Phase I safety results in August; and ENV-6946, an inflammatory bowel disease therapy currently in Phase I that Enveda plans to advance into Phase II.

The Series E brings Enveda's total funding since its founding to more than $845 million, according to the company, and is the third large round it has raised in as many years. Investors in the new round include Durable Capital Partners, ICONIQ, Lightspeed, Surveyor Capital, accounts advised by T. Rowe Price Investment Management, Digitalis Ventures, a sovereign wealth fund and Alderline Group, alongside existing backers such as Baillie Gifford, Premji Invest and Lux Capital.

Enveda co-founder and CEO Viswa Colluru pointed to a persistent gap in drug development as the company's reason for being. "The industry has gotten really, really good at commercializing a molecule once you know it's right, but has increasingly gotten worse at finding the right molecule," he said. Colluru has said he wants Enveda to become a household name, with medicines that reach hundreds of millions of people within a decade.

The financing is one of several large rounds this year for companies applying AI to drug discovery, as investors continue to bet that machine-learning models can find promising drug candidates that conventional chemistry has missed.