London-Based Startup LabGenius Raises $10M

The London-based startup LabGenius announced that they raised over $10 million in Series A Funding. They are a drug discovery company that utilizes artificial intelligence (AI), robotic automation, and synthetic biology. Their main focus is to find novel protein therapeutics. 

According to Dr James Field, CEO and Founder of LabGenius, “Protein therapeutics have an unparalleled potential to both treat disease and alleviate human suffering. By transforming how these drugs are discovered, we have a shot at improving the lives of countless people. Being able to robustly engineer novel therapeutic proteins has immense commercial and societal value. The discovery of protein therapeutics has historically been highly artisanal, relying heavily on humans for both experimental design and execution. This dependence has proved limiting because, as a species, we’re cognitively incapable of fully grasping the complexity of biological systems.”

The Series A investment round is led by Lux Capital and Obvious Ventures. Other participants included Felicis Ventures, Inovia Capital, Air Street Capital, and other existing investors. CEO and founder of Recursion Pharmaceuticals, Chris Gibson, along with Inovia Capital General Partner Patrick Pichette, are also investing. Pichette is the former CFO of Google. 

According to the company, they will use the capital to “scale their team, expand the scope of its discovery platform, and initiate an internal asset development program.” One of their main goals is to evolve novel antibody fragments. These could be used to treat certain conditions that can’t rely on conventional antibody formats. 

Lux Capital and Obvious Ventures

Zavain Dar, Partner at Lux Capital, along with Nan Li, Managing Director at Obvious Ventures, have been involved in the life science startup environment for some time. Their investment strategy dates back nine years, including a 2013 investment into Zymergen, a molecule discovery and manufacture company based out of California. In 2016, they were involved in Recursion Pharmaceuticals, who went on to a series C raise of $156 million in July. 

Their strategy follows a path, starting at industrial biotech technology with Zymergen and followed by root-cause biology discovery with Recursion Pharmaceuticals. It is closed out by creating composition of matter and IP with LabGenius.  

Dar explained his reasoning behind choosing LabGenius over other startups. 

“We scoured the globe, and didn’t want to be constrained by what happened to be in our backyard,” he says. “They are leading the pack…and now with backing and pharma partnerships, should be in a good position.”

Humans No Longer Sole Agents of Innovation

When speaking to TechCrunch, Dr James Field said, “My central thesis, the thing that’s really the driving force behind the company, is the conviction that we’re entering an age in which humans will no longer be the sole agents of innovation. Instead, new knowledge, technologies and sophisticated real-world products will be invented by smart robotic platforms called empirical computation engines. An empirical computation engine is an artificial system capable of recursively and intelligently searching a solution space.”

The company has created a discovery platform called EVA, and it integrates multiple new technologies coming from different fields including artificial intelligence. After discovery and characterisation, LabGenius then sends their proprietary molecules to clinics. 

Field explains the company’s EVA technology as a “machine learning-driven, robotic platform”,” that is capable of “designing, conducting and critically learning from its own experiments.” 

“For decades, scientists, engineers and technologists have dreamt of building ‘robot scientists’ capable of autonomously discovering new knowledge, technologies and sophisticated real-world products,” says Field.

“For protein engineers, that dream has now entered the realm of possibility. The rapid pace of technological development across the fields of synthetic biology, robotic automation and ML has given us access to all the essential ingredients required to create a smart robotic platform capable of intelligently discovering novel therapeutic proteins.”