Recursion Receives $50 Million Investment from NVIDIA

Recursion announced on July 12, 2023 it has received a $50 million investment from NVIDIA, the Santa Clara, CA-based multinational company supplying hardware and software used in mobile computing, media/entertainment, the automotive industry, and notably artificial intelligence (AI).

The investment was executed as a private investment in public equity (PIPE), the practice of an institutional or an accredited investor buying stock directly from a public company at below market price. Recursion closed its initial public offering (IPO) in April 2021 in which the company generated over $500 million, as covered by TechBuzz. On July 11 Recursion's stock traded on the Nasdaq at under $7 per share. It closed today at just under $12.

As part of the announced collaboration with NVIDIA, Recursion plans to accelerate development of its AI foundation models for biology and chemistry which it intends to optimize and distribute to biotechnology companies using NVIDIA cloud services.

“Our collaboration with NVIDIA represents two best-in-class companies coming together to help solve one of the world’s most difficult challenges, drug discovery,” said Chris Gibson, Ph.D., Co-founder and CEO of Recursion. “With our powerful dataset and NVIDIA’s accelerated computing capabilities, we intend to create groundbreaking foundation models in biology and chemistry at a scale unlike anything that has ever been released in the biological space.”

Recursion plans to utilize its vast proprietary biological and chemical dataset, which exceeds 23 petabytes and 3 trillion searchable gene and compound relationships, to accelerate the training of foundation models on NVIDIA DGX™ Cloud for possible commercial license/release on BioNeMo, NVIDIA’s cloud service for generative AI in drug discovery. NVIDIA will also help optimize and scale Recursion foundation models leveraging the NVIDIA AI stack and NVIDIA’s full-stack computing expertise. BioNeMo was announced earlier this year as a cloud service for generative AI in drug discovery, offering tools to quickly customize and deploy domain-specific, state-of-the-art biomolecular models at-scale through cloud APIs. Recursion anticipates using this software to support its internal pipeline as well as its current and future partners.

"Generative AI is a revolutionary tool to discover new medicines and treatments,” said Jensen Huang, founder and CEO of NVIDIA. “We are delighted to collaborate with Recursion’s world-class team, which is doing pioneering work in digital biology and chemistry with NVIDIA DGX and NVIDIA AI software to accelerate the development of the world’s largest biomolecular generative AI models and speed drug discovery for biotech and pharmaceutical companies.”

Recursion, through its acquisition of Valence Discovery (Montréal), announced on May 8, 2023, intends to accelerate the development of new technologies to feed the biopharma industry, while simultaneously democratizing access to large-scale models that have maximum impact in drug discovery.

Headquartered in downtown Salt Lake City in The Gateway, Recursion Pharmaceuticals is a next-gen biopharma company combining experimental biology and automation with artificial intelligence to discover potential drugs for genetic disease, inflammation, immunology, and infectious disease. Recursion also has offices in Toronto, Montréal and the San Francisco Bay Area.

Enabling its mission is the Recursion OS, a platform built across diverse technologies that continuously expands one of the world’s largest proprietary biological and chemical datasets. Recursion leverages sophisticated machine-learning algorithms to distill from its dataset a collection of trillions of searchable relationships across biology and chemistry unconstrained by human bias. By commanding massive experimental scale and massive computational scale—operating one of the most powerful supercomputers in the world—Recursion unites technology, biology, and chemistry to advance the future of medicine.

Recursion is also a founding and prominent member of BioHive, a rapidly-growing life sciences industry community in Utah with over 1,100 members.