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Korea biotech start-up gets $44.5m pre-IPO round

Korea biotech start-up gets $44.5m pre-IPO round
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Korea’s Standigm, which provides artificial intelligence (AI) systems to biotech operators, has raised a $44.5 billion pre-IPO round led by SKS Private Equity and Daishin Privat Equity.

SKS PE, whose affiliate SK Holdings provided $8.6 million to Standigm in 2019, is a spinout of SK Securities, which itself separated from SK Group in 2018. Daishin PE was set up in 2014 as a wholly-owned subsidiary of Daishin Securities.

SK Holdings also participated in the latest round and remains Standigm's second-largest shareholder. It was joined by Intervest, KDB Bank, Asset One, Kakao Ventures, LB Investment, Atinum Investment, DSC Investment, and Wonik Investment Partners. Standigm said this would be its last funding round before listing on the Korea Exchange later this year.

Mirae Asset Capital led a $11.5 million Series B in 2019 that also included Kakao Ventures, one of Standigm's earliest institutional investors. In 2016, Kakao joined two seed rounds worth a combined $3.2 million under the name K Cube Ventures. Total funding to date comes to $68 million.

Founded in 2015, Standigm provides AI-enabled platforms for drug target discovery and novel drug generation that are said to help pharmaceutical companies save time and cost. The company works with more than 10 pharmaceutical and academic partners, including SK Chemicals, Hanmi Pharmaceuticals, HK inno.N, and Samjin Pharmaceutical.

In January, Standigm announced that it had repurposed a US-approved drug for rheumatoid arthritis and applied for a relevant patent alongside SK Chemicals. Two patents for Standigm's own AI technology were granted by the Korean intellectual property office earlier this year. Recent collaborations with SK Holdings include the launch of a drug analysis platform called iClue&Ask.

"Standigm is a highly innovative AI biotech leading the fourth industrial revolution," Wonho Jeong, a director of SKS PE, said in a statement. "We invest in Standigm with pride because we have found its strengths in the powerful and automated AI platforms to produce continuous lead compounds and its real-world business model."

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