This funding will advance Enveda’s platform to discover and develop new drug candidates from the first high-resolution chemical map of the natural world
Enveda Biosciences, a leading biotechnology company harnessing the power of nature’s chemistry to develop next-gen small molecule therapeutics, today announced an oversubscribed $51M Series A funding round. The financing was led by Lux Capital, with participation from Two Sigma Ventures, Hummingbird VC, Catalio Capital, Lifeforce Capital, and Matthew De Silva of Notable Labs along with existing investors True Ventures, Wireframe Ventures, Village Global, and Chris Gibson of Recursion.
Nature is the greatest source of therapeutics we know, yet 95 percent of the natural world is a chemical mystery. Enveda is systematically exploring this unknown space to unlock its potential for new medicines with the first high-resolution chemical map of the natural world. This new investment will further power Enveda’s data-driven approach to screening, validating, and developing high-potential natural compounds into first-in-class clinical candidates.
“We see this investment as validation of a renaissance in natural product drug discovery,” said Viswa Colluru, the company’s Founder and CEO. “This field can be transformed through recent advances in automation, machine learning, and metabolomics. At Enveda, we’re bringing all of these technologies together to unlock the vast untapped potential of natural products in the form of highly translatable medicines.”
Enveda was founded in 2019 to apply cutting-edge machine learning and metabolomics to a 50,000-year-old human practice: extracting medicinal value from plants. The natural world has given rise to countless transformative medicines, including aspirin, statins, and morphine. However, extracting active compounds from nature has often been notoriously slow and imprecise. As a result, at the end of the 20th century many drug discovery programs shifted to a higher throughput, target-based approach.
“There is so much latent potential in the natural world and so many hard-to-treat diseases that lack any therapeutic option,” said Zavain Dar, partner at Lux Capital. “We’re excited to partner with Viswa and this uniquely talented team that is digitizing the world’s chemistry to map the future of small molecule drug discovery.”
The Enveda platform has the potential to fundamentally change where we find new medicines, and the speed and scale at which we find them. Leveraging machine learning and metabolomics, the platform operates like a search engine, predicting novel chemistry at scale. This novel chemistry is then used to generate multiple high-confidence biological datasets in-house, leading to rapid identification of molecules with desired biological activity and organ distribution. These candidates then undergo in vivo and in vitro validation in Enveda’s lab, yielding drug candidates and completing a data-feedback loop into the Enveda platform.
Enveda is on track to advance multiple lead molecules derived from plants, including candidates for Wilson’s Disease, NASH, and Parkinson’s disease, among others. With this new round of funding, Enveda plans to advance its existing portfolio of lead molecules and discoveries through preclinical development and ramp up recruitment efforts to expand its team across metabolomics, machine learning, medicinal chemistry, and biology.
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