CAMBRIDGE, Mass. — Reverie Labs, a pharmaceutical company pioneering the application of machine learning to developing next-generation small molecule kinase inhibitors, announced the closure of its $25 million Series A financing, and the addition of Wayne Holman, M.D., founder and CEO of Ridgeback Capital, to Reverie’s Board of Directors.
This financing brings the total capital raised by Reverie to more than $32 million. Reverie will use the proceeds to advance its internal and partnered drug discovery programs towards the clinic, further develop its innovative computational discovery platform, and grow its world-class, cross-disciplinary team of scientists and engineers.
While tremendous progress has been made towards the advent of cancer precision medicine, for many cancer subtypes patient outcomes are still poor. Off-target toxicities limit the dose and thus the effectiveness of many drugs, and crucially prevent these drugs from being used in combination to circumvent resistance mechanisms. Reverie’s goal is to contribute exquisitely specific kinase inhibitors to humanity’s armamentarium for fighting disease. Reverie believes that only with access to an arsenal of targeted therapies will clinicians have the tools they need to not just produce small survival benefits, but durable, complete responses to therapy.
Reverie’s lead program, which is rapidly advancing towards the clinic, is targeting a well-validated disease mechanism with highly specific and brain-penetrant kinase inhibitors. Reverie is also supplementing its pipeline through carefully chosen partnerships, including a multi-target strategic collaboration agreement with Roche and Genentech, a member of the Roche Group.
“Too often in the pharmaceutical industry, data is treated as a by-product of doing drug discovery, not an intentionally generated asset for the purpose of improving one’s platform. This capital will allow us to prioritize data generation and double down on the personnel and technology needed to develop our best-in-class computational kinase platform,” said Ankit Gupta, Reverie’s co-founder and CTO.
“We are tremendously excited to be working with a deeply experienced biotech fund like Ridgeback, which has supported myriad companies in rapidly advancing compounds into clinical development,” added Jonah Kallenbach, Reverie’s co-founder and CEO. “Additionally, this funding will allow us to aggressively expand our extraordinary team of scientists and engineers.”
“The Ridgeback team has watched for several years with great enthusiasm as the growing Reverie team has transformed an idea into an organization with a special ability to combine artificial intelligence and biomedical innovation to rapidly create medicines with efficiency and precision,” said Wayne Holman. “Data generation in biology and drug development has accelerated dramatically over the last two decades, and the talent and skills Jonah, Ankit, and their team possess in machine learning and AI position them well to exploit that data to design better molecules to meet severe unmet needs.”
