"We're excited to become a clinical-stage biotech company; it's exciting from an AI drug discovery standpoint," says Absci founder and CEO Sean McClain. Artificial intelligence has been working its way into the drug development process for years now, but with little to show so far in revamping the notoriously burdensome process. While drugs are being developed using AI in a variety of ways, no drugs developed completely by AI, from start to finish, have so far made it over the finish line of regulatory approval. For that reason, every attempt by an AI drug to get approval is a landmark of sorts. Tuesday, drug development startup Absci, based in Vancouver, Washington, announced such a landmark, the beginning of a Phase I clinical trial for a therapy it built from scratch using generative AI to treat irritable bowel disease.

VANCOUVER, Wash.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--ZoomInfo (NASDAQ: ZI), a global leader in modern go-to-market software, data, and intelligence, today announced it has agreed to acquire Chorus.ai, More than 20,000 global revenue teams trust ZoomInfo to power their go-to-market motions and drive efficient results. The planned acquisition of Chorus will add a new category of actionable insights to ZoomInfo's world-class intelligence layer, unlocking workflows and driving engagement informed by conversations. The acquisition expands ZoomInfo's total addressable market to $70 billion, and is expected to be accretive to growth immediately, generate positive adjusted operating income within 12 months, and be accretive to cash flow in the second half of FY 2022. Chorus uses machine learning and artificial intelligence to capture and analyze prospect and customer calls, meetings, and emails.

Vancouver, WA: ZoomInfo, the global leader in go-to-market (GTM) intelligence solutions, today announced the acquisition of Seattle-area based technology startup Komiko, whose technology will integrate into the ZoomInfo Powered by DiscoverOrg platform. Designed to accelerate the sales pipeline with valuable analytics, Komiko's AI-powered CRM automation, playbooks, and predictive analytics will be released as ZoomInfo InboxAI. Founded by Microsoft executives Hal Howard and Ami Heitner, Komiko utilizes machine learning and data science to better automate the CRM process. Now as a function of ZoomInfo InboxAI, the technology can capture contact and activity data buried deep in the email inboxes and calendars of sales representatives. That data is then populated within the CRM system of record -- triggering alerts and generating analytics essential to supporting renewals, managing new business pipelines, and giving every organization a 360-degree view of customers, prospects, and partners.

In 1973, Paul Allen was a twenty-year-old technologist who, like many celebrated entrepreneurs, had taken a leave of absence from university to pursue work as a programmer. Over plates of pizza one summer day in Vancouver, Washington, he posed a fanciful question to his longtime classmate and soon-to-be business partner, Bill Gates: What if you could read headlines from a personal computer terminal without needing to get your hands on a copy of the day's paper? "Come on, Paul!" Gates replied. "It costs seventy-five dollars a month to rent a Teletype, and you can get a paper delivered for fifteen cents. How do you compete with that?"