Recursion, a publicly listed biotech company, today announced that it has received a $50 million investment by NVIDIA, which was executed as a private investment in public equity (PIPE).
Simultaneously, Recursion has also announced a partnership with NVIDIA to speed up the development of AI foundation models for biology and chemistry, which it plans to optimize and distribute to other biotech companies using NVIDIA cloud services.
Following NVIDIA’s investment, Recursion’s stock (ticker: RXRX) experienced a remarkable surge of over 60% at the market open today, reaching $14.67, a significant increase compared to its previous closing price of $6.78.
Recursion plans to leverage its extensive proprietary biological and chemical dataset, which exceeds 23 petabytes and 3 trillion searchable gene and compound relationships. The aim is to expedite the training of foundation models utilizing NVIDIA DGX™ Cloud for possible commercial license or release on BioNeMo, NVIDIA’s cloud service tailored for generative AI in drug discovery.
“Our collaboration with NVIDIA represents two best-in-class companies coming together to help solve one of the world’s most difficult challenges, drug discovery,” said Chris Gibson, Ph.D., Co-founder and CEO of Recursion. “With our powerful dataset and NVIDIA’s accelerated computing capabilities, we intend to create groundbreaking foundation models in biology and chemistry at a scale unlike anything that has ever been released in the biological space.”
To further enhance and scale Recursion’s foundation models, NVIDIA will provide its AI stack and comprehensive computing expertise. Earlier this year, BioNeMo was introduced as a cloud service, offering domain-specific, cutting-edge biomolecular models that can be easily customized and deployed at scale through cloud APIs.
“Generative AI is a revolutionary tool to discover new medicines and treatments,” said Jensen Huang, founder and CEO of NVIDIA. “We are delighted to collaborate with Recursion’s world-class team, which is doing pioneering work in digital biology and chemistry with NVIDIA DGX and NVIDIA AI software to accelerate the development of the world’s largest biomolecular generative AI models and speed drug discovery for biotech and pharmaceutical companies.”
In May, Recursion acquired Valence, an AI-driven deep learning institute for drug discovery, and Cyclica, an AI-enabled deep learning engine for digital chemistry. Through these acquisitions, Recursion aims to provide widespread access to large-scale models that can significantly impact the field of drug discovery.
Source: mPost
