London-based life science firm LabGenius has raised £35m in Series B funding for its machine learning-powered drug discovery platform.
Founded in 2012, LabGenius has been developing its EVA drug discovery platform for several years. The company said the EVA platform uses machine learning – a subset of AI – to design, conduct and learn from experiments to identify high-performing antibodies.
LabGenius is using its platform to develop solutions against solid tumours, which can be resistant to therapeutic antibodies.
“Being able to engineer complex multi-specific antibodies has immense potential value,” said Dr James Field, CEO of LabGenius.
“I am inspired by the relentless drive that our team has shown in getting us to this important milestone and look forward to working with our investors as we accelerate the development of both our platform and pipeline.”
The funding round was led by M Ventures with participation from Octopus Ventures, LG Corp and existing investors Atomico, Kindred Capital, Lux Capital and Obvious Ventures.
“LabGenius’ differentiated ML-driven platform enables the rapid co-optimisation of complex multi-specific antibodies across both disease-relevant cell-based assays and key developability assays,” said M Ventures’ Dr Oliver Hardick.
“The LabGenius approach has the potential to address many of the fundamental challenges faced by antibody engineers.”
The latest investment brings LabGenius’ total funding to £58m. The company previously raised $10m (£7.9m) in a Series A round in 2019.
Read more: How AI is paving a new way for drug discovery in the UK