5Y leads $74m round for China AI drug developer
Beijing-based HeliXon, an artificial intelligence-enabled developer of protein-based drugs, has raised CNY 500m (USD 75m) in Series A funding led by 5Y Capital. Other investors include Gaorong Capital and Neumann Capital.
Three existing backers - Xiang He Capital, GL Ventures, and Qingzhi Capital - re-upped in the Series A. They provided an angel round last year.
HeliXon was founded in June 2021 by Jian Peng, formerly an associate professor of computer science at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (UIUC). Peng won the 2020 Overton Prize, one of the most prestigious awards in computational biology, and returned to China to be a senior visiting professor at Tsinghua University.
HeliXon provides AI tools and data acquisition technologies that enable scientists to decipher protein function and interaction, explore large-scale genomic datasets for target identification, and design therapeutics. The goal is to make new drug development faster and more efficient.
Its proprietary platform, HeliXonAI, integrates algorithms and experimental approaches to enable the discovery of novel antibodies and macromolecule-based therapeutics for previously intractable targets.
The new capital will go towards “AI + new drug development" initiatives, recruitment, business development expansion, improving AI computing capabilities, internal drug pipeline development, and external collaborations.
The company has developed algorithms for the design and modeling of various protein drugs, integrating them with high-throughput experimental platforms to create a closed-loop of design and experimental verification. It has begun to lay out R&D pipelines and is looking to advance drug candidates to the clinical stage.
Other Chinese start-ups operating in this area include Insilico Medicine, which recently closed a USD 60 million Series D round.
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