Insilico Medicine, a Hong Kong headquartered company applying end-to-end artificial intelligence (AI) for target discovery, small-molecule chemistry and clinical development, has closed a $255 million Series C financing led by Warburg Pincus. The financing was also participated in by current investors including Qiming Venture Partners, Pavilion Capital, Eight Roads Ventures, Lilly Asia Ventures, Sinovation Ventures, BOLD Capital Partners, Formic Ventures, Baidu Ventures. New investors included CPE, OrbiMed, Mirae Asset Capital, B Capital Group, Deerfield Management, Maison Capital, Lake Bleu Capital, President International Development Corporation, Sequoia Capital China and Sage Partners.

As a pioneer in the AI for drug discovery field, Insilico Medicine has a broadly distributed discovery partner network and has initiated multiple internal therapeutic programmes, including a programme in which the company demonstrated the first case of AI identifying a novel target for a major pulmonary disease, generating novel molecules for that novel target, and completing the preclinical experiments required to nominate a preclinical candidate in under 18 months. Insilico Medicine also developed the AI-powered drug discovery platform consisting of the PandaOmics AI-powered novel target discovery engine, the Chemistry42 deep generative reinforcement learning system allowing for de-novo design of novel molecules with the desired properties that do not exist in the known chemical space, and InClinico, which predicts clinical trial outcomes.

Proceeds from the financing will be used to progress Insilico Medicine’s current therapeutic programmes into human clinical trials, initiate multiple new programmes for novel and difficult targets, and further develop its AI and drug discovery capabilities.