San Francisco-based startup Insitro announced Tuesday that it raised $143 million in a Series B financing round led by Andreessen Horowitz.
Insitro operates as a biotech platform that can produce “disease-relevant biological data at scale.” The company uses machine learning technology to generate predictive disease models in an effort to improve clinical strategy.
So far, these models have been applied by the company to better understand diseases that affect the central nervous system.
“While many of us have witnessed the incredible medical advances transforming our ability to treat and even cure patients, drug discovery and development is getting harder and more expensive, leaving many patients without effective therapies,” Daphne Koller, founder and CEO of Insitro, said in a statement.
Koller was something of a child prodigy. At 26, she became a computer science professor at Stanford University. Koller then went on to win a grant from the MacArthur Foundation for her genomics research, and later helped build out the online education platform Coursera. She founded Insitro in 2018.
The company has been a success. As Forbes reported, Koller managed to raise $100 million in just six months from Andreessen Horowitz, ARCH Ventures, GV, Third Rock and Foresite Capital, among others, in order to get Insitro off the ground. Last April, the company received $15 million after signing off on a three-year collaborative deal with biopharmaceutical giant Gilead Sciences. Jeff Bezos, CEO of Amazon, is also among the company’s previous investors.
Insitro’s team consists of just over 60 computational scientists, engineers, biologists and drug developers. The team combines forces in order to create lab experiments that can produce “massive” amounts of data in a relatively short time frame.
The company’s machine-learning model looks for patterns within these data sets in order to suggest potential solutions and patient care strategies. All things considered, the process allows for Insitro to conclude disease research “in a matter of weeks instead of years,” Koller told Forbes.
“Over the last decade a revolution in machine learning has enabled solutions to problems I thought intractable during my lifetime,” Koller said in a statement.
Insitro will use the new funding to continue its disease research efforts by way of prosecuting “newly identified genetic targets.” The company is also currently hiring for more than 10 roles, according to its careers page.
