Enveda secures $311M to bring more nature-derived AI drugs into clinical trials

Enveda, a biotech startup that uses AI to discover new drugs in the natural world, has raised a $311 million Series E at a $2 billion valuation. The fresh funding, which was led by Catalio Capital Management, with participation from Iconiq and others, doubles the valuation Enveda achieved 12 months ago. The idea behind Enveda is that powerful medicines could be harnessed from plants and microbes, rather than synthesized from scratch in a lab. Viswa Colluru, an early employee of Recursion Pharmaceuticals, founded Enveda in 2019 to speed up the process of discovering these new drugs using AI and other techniques. While AI hasn’t yet produced any FDA-approved drugs, Enveda is among the wave of companies advancing AI-discovered candidates into human clinical trials. The startup is currently testing several drugs in patients, including one targeting severe skin conditions and another designed to help maintain weight loss after stopping GLP-1s.