InstaDeep, one of the leaders in the design of decision-making Artificial Intelligence systems, announced on January 25 that it had raised $100 million (€88 million). The company closed a Series B round led by DeepTech investment firm Alpha Intelligence Capital and supported by CDIB. BioNTech, Chimera Abu Dhabi, Deutsche Bahn Digital Ventures, Google, G42 and Synergie participated in this latest round. Founded in 2014 by Karim Beguir and Zohra Slim, InstaDeep is a leader in decision AI systems, it has been named two years in a row to the CB Insights AI 100 ranking of the world's 100 most promising private artificial intelligence companies. The company develops patented AI products such as its DeepChainTM protein design platform and collaborates with leading companies such as Google DeepMind, Nvidia and Intel.

Firm leverages AI technology similar to facial recognition to figure out which small molecules can bind most effectively with targeted enzymes. Does the future of drug development lie in a kind of facial-recognition technology for enzymes? That is the hope of X-37 LLC, a drug-development startup that is using artificial intelligence and a deep neural network developed by San Francisco-based Atomwise. "We think that this is an approach and a technology that is really going to transform drug discovery across the board," said Dr. David Collier, CEO of X-37, which is partly owned by Atomwise and is based in South San Francisco, California. It was founded last year.

X-37 was cofounded by Atomwise Inc. and a team of experienced pharmaceutical developers from Velocity Pharmaceutical Development. In addition to the above development programs, the team at X-37 will identify additional high-value drug targets, generate novel drug leads against these targets using Atomwise's world-class AI platform for structure-based drug design, and develop each of these drug programs to a medically-relevant inflection point, where it can be acquired by or partnered with a major pharmaceutical company to be brought to market. X-37 makes use of an LLC structure permitting each drug development program to be housed in a separate virtual company under the parent LLC. This structure is tax efficient and flexible, in that it allows X-37 to divest individual drug development programs, while maintaining the parent company and team. X-37 began operation in 2018 and has already generated promising novel hit molecules against several targets of high interest to the pharmaceutical industry.