Aqemia has raised €30 million in a Series A funding round to further support its mission to massively scale drug discovery through a first-in-class technological platform combining quantum-inspired physics and machine learning.
The financing was led by Eurazeo and Bpifrance through its Large Venture fund, with the participation of Elaia – its historic investor.
Aqemia’s ‘innovation engine’, the Launchpad, has proven successful in several disclosed and undisclosed collaborations worth up to millions of euros with pharmaceutical companies such as Sanofi, Janssen and Servier. This technology has resulted in the launch of a proprietary pipeline of several drug discovery projects, which now range from in vitro to in vivo phases, especially in oncology and immuno-oncology.
Aqemia’s ambition is to optimise and accelerate early drug discovery projects on a massive scale in order to uncover dozens of proprietary new drug candidates. Those candidates will fuel a diversified therapeutic pipeline across a variety of targets and indications that Aqemia intends to advance into clinical trials alone through a constellation of Biotech spin-offs or with partners as the case may be.
Unlike AI-based platforms that need experimental data to train on, Aqemia addresses drug discovery projects from their earliest stage by generating its own data using unique quantum physics algorithms derived from 12 years of research at the universities of Cambridge and Oxford (UK), and École Normale Supérieure and CNRS.
“After repeated successes in generating very efficiently innovative new chemical matter in collaboration with large pharmaceutical companies around the world, we are now excited to leverage this fundraising to accelerate towards Aqemia’s mission: build a massive pipeline of wholly-owned drug discovery projects”, said Maximilien Levesque, Co-founder and CEO of Aqemia.
“The unprecedented pace – a whopping 10,000x faster while maintaining costs – and accuracy of our deep physics algorithms, adding up to our generative AI, creates a unique combination that permits to generate innovative new drug candidates more quickly, and scale drug discovery projects as technology projects”, said Emmanuelle Martiano, Co-Founder & COO of Aqemia. “We are continuously recruiting to address our next technology and drug discovery challenges”, she added.
Laurent Higueret, Senior Investment Director at Bpifrance’s Large Venture fund, added: “Early drug discovery is a long, costly and cumbersome process with often unsatisfactory outcomes for sponsors and ultimately patients. Aqemia’s ambition is to change all that by bringing together deep physics and AI into a powerful computational engine that has the potential to generate promising new development candidates at scale. Through this investment, we are thrilled to be part of this exciting journey and further expand Bpifrance portfolio in deeptech and AI.”
