Recursion Announces Collaboration and $50 Million Investment from NVIDIA to Accelerate Groundbreaking Foundation Models in AI-Enabled Drug Discovery

On July 12, 2023 Recursion (NASDAQ: RXRX), a leading clinical stage TechBio company decoding biology to industrialize drug discovery, reported a $50 million investment by NVIDIA, which was executed as a private investment in public equity (PIPE) (Press release, Recursion Pharmaceuticals, JUL 12, 2023, View Source [SID1234635362]). Recursion also announced plans to accelerate development of its AI foundation models for biology and chemistry, which, in collaboration with NVIDIA, it intends to optimize and distribute to biotechnology companies using NVIDIA cloud services.

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"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."

Recursion plans to utilize its vast proprietary biological and chemical dataset, which exceeds 23 petabytes and 3 trillion searchable gene and compound relationships, to accelerate the training of foundation models on NVIDIA DGX Cloud for possible commercial license/release on BioNeMo, NVIDIA’s cloud service for generative AI in drug discovery. NVIDIA will also help optimize and scale Recursion foundation models leveraging the NVIDIA AI stack and NVIDIA’s full-stack computing expertise. BioNeMo was announced earlier this year as a cloud service for generative AI in drug discovery, offering tools to quickly customize and deploy domain-specific, state-of-the-art biomolecular models at-scale through cloud APIs. Recursion anticipates using this software to support its internal pipeline as well as its current and future partners.

"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."

Recursion, through its recent acquisition of Valence Discovery, aims to accelerate the development of new technologies to feed the biopharma industry, while simultaneously democratizing access to large-scale models that have maximum impact in drug discovery.