Envisagenics' artificial intelligence wows real investors - Innovate Long Island

Now based in New York City, the biotech announced this week that it's been awarded a $1.5 million Small Business Innovation Research Phase II grant from the National Institutes of Health – the second time the NIH has backed the data-crunching startup. The new award is earmarked for the continued development of SpliceCore, Envisagenics' proprietary, cloud-based drug-discovery platform, which uses artificial-intelligence protocols to identify biomarkers and potential pharmaceutical targets. The two-year NIH grant also continues a significant hot streak for the bioinformatics-focused startup, launched in 2013 by cofounders Maria Luisa Pineda and Martin Ackerman with the help of a $100,000 seed investment by Accelerate Long Island and the Long Island Emerging Technology Fund. Envisagenics, which earned a $225,000 SBIR Phase I grant in 2015, announced earlier this month that California-based venture fund M12 (formerly Microsoft Ventures) and Washington State-based Madrona Venture Group were sinking a combined $1 million into the NYC biotech. And that chunky investment followed the November 2017 closing of a successful $2.3 million funding round, with multiple investors – including the Empire State Development Corp., New York's main economic-development driver – buying in.