SAN FRANCISCO– VeriSIM Life (VeriSIM), the leading artificial intelligence (AI)-enabled, unique R&D decisions de-risker for breakthrough drug development, today announced it has closed its oversubscribed $15 million Series A round. The financing was led by Morpheus Ventures. Additional new investors include Debiopharm Innovation Fund and Colorcon Ventures, with continued support from existing investors OCA Ventures, Intel Capital, Serra Ventures and Susa Ventures.
This investment strengthens VeriSIM’s continued growth trajectory by helping scale its operations, democratize its ‘virtual drug development engine’ BIOiSIM, fast-track its sales and marketing efforts and continue work on transformational partnerships with industry and academia.
VeriSIM’s BIOiSIM platform, driven by artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML), de-risks R&D decisions by providing meaningful insights much earlier in the drug development process with unprecedented accuracy and scalability. More than 90% of drugs tested in animals fail to pass human clinical trials, resulting in delayed development and high costs. VeriSIM’s platform solves this decades-old translatability problem within the drug development phase and ensures clinical success of drugs intended for highly unmet needs. With its first-in-class platform, VeriSIM is transforming the way pharmaceutical and biotech companies address the most challenging diseases impacting humankind.
“We are excited to partner with these strategic investor groups to expand our platform so pharma/biotech companies can make more informed decisions on investigational drugs,” said Dr. Jo Varshney, founder and CEO of VeriSIM Life. “This new funding will allow us to accelerate our growth and bring the future of more efficient, cost-effective clinical trials to life. Our goal is to make VeriSIM the gold standard in addressing the translational gap in the industry.”
BIOiSIM is uniquely positioned to launch preclinical programs and secure clinical successes in an unparalleled way, rarely seen in the industry. With an intense focus on building the infrastructure to generate stacks of unbiased models and validation, VeriSIM has emerged as a leader in helping to develop life-saving therapies.
Morpheus Ventures’ partner, Damien Petty, said, “VeriSIM has surpassed customer expectations in delivering better, faster and more comprehensive development decisions. We have long believed in the disruptive potential of applying AI/ML to challenging problems. While others have made progress applying AI to fixing the drug discovery process, the long and costly post-discovery development phase has been largely overlooked. VeriSIM is unique in applying physics-based AI/ML models to disrupting the drug development phase to achieve significant results for its customers and partners.” Petty led Morpheus’ investments in Vicarious, Rigetti Computing, Ten63 Therapeutics, and Starship Technologies.
“Our decision to invest in VeriSIM Life is largely due to the validated ability of their BIOiSIM platform to reduce time, costs and risks associated with drug development,” said Tanja Dowe, CEO of the Debiopharm Innovation Fund. “The value of using this AI-based platform to decrease the number of outsourced preclinical experiments offers substantial benefit to pharmaceutical researchers, allowing them to narrow down the selection of early-stage drug compounds more efficiently and focus on developing treatments that are most likely to help patients overcome their disease.”
VeriSIM Life was founded in 2017 by Dr. Jo Varshney, DVM and PhD, alongside a truly cross-functional team of pharmaceutical scientists, software engineers and AI/ML and simulation experts.
