Video: Reengineering Drug Discovery With Recursion

Within life sciences, one of Menlo’s major focus areas is therapeutic platforms—drug discovery companies that leverage novel platform technologies such as artificial intelligence to find potential drugs that could never be identified through traditional means. AI enables the processing of data sets of unprecedented size and complexity to generate novel candidates; we look for companies that can combine that computational power with strong drug development expertise to validate and find the best potential drugs. One such example in our portfolio is Recursion Pharmaceuticals.

Recursion combines a novel computer vision platform with deep disease biology and chemistry. The company initiated four clinical programs in 2022 with a pipeline of 36 additional pre-clinical programs (compared to a typical biotech that may be developing one clinical and three pre-clinical programs). We invested in the Series B in 2017, and Recursion went public in 2021.