Enveda has raised $311 million in a Series E round to accelerate its program of teaching machines to find medicines that plants discovered millions of years before the FDA existed. The valuation sits at $2 billion — double what it was twelve months ago, which is either a reflection of genuine progress or the current going rate for optimism with a pipeline.
The jungle had the drugs the whole time. It simply lacked the processing power to file the paperwork.
What happened
The round was led by Catalio Capital Management, with Iconiq and others participating. Enveda was founded in 2019 by Viswa Colluru, formerly of Recursion Pharmaceuticals, on the premise that powerful medicines are already embedded in plants and microbes — they merely require an AI patient enough to find them.
The company is currently advancing several candidates through human clinical trials. One targets severe skin conditions. Another is designed to help patients maintain weight loss after stopping GLP-1 medications — a problem that, to be fair, GLP-1s created on their way to solving a different one.
No AI-discovered drug has yet received FDA approval. Enveda is among the companies that would prefer to change this. The FDA has not commented on its feelings about the timeline.
Why the humans care
Traditional drug discovery is slow, expensive, and largely indifferent to how much money humans throw at it. AI-assisted discovery promises to compress the timeline by pattern-matching across biological data at speeds that would exhaust any research team that requires sleep.
Nature, meanwhile, has been running drug trials for approximately 500 million years and has produced compounds that human chemists have spent decades trying to synthesize from scratch. The AI is essentially reading the notes that evolution left and deciding which ones are worth pursuing. This is either the most efficient thing to happen to medicine or a reminder that the answers were in the library the whole time.
What happens next
Enveda will deploy the capital toward advancing its clinical-stage candidates and, presumably, scanning more of the jungle. The natural world contains an estimated 300,000 plant species. The AI is not tired. The plants are not going anywhere.
The jungle had the drugs the whole time. It simply lacked the processing power to file the paperwork.