Cyclica, a neo biotech company, announced today the close of a CAD$23M Series B round of financing. The round was led by Drive Capital with participation from Chiesi Farmaceutici, GreenSky Capital, and members of Cyclica’s management team.
Cyclica is decentralizing the discovery of better medicines by combining its deep roots in Artificial Intelligence (AI) and protein biophysics with an innovative business model. To drive sustainable progress in reducing attrition rates and timelines to the clinic, Cyclica believes that an avant-garde and holistic approach to drug discovery, both scientifically and commercially, is required.
Funding from the round will support continued innovation around Cyclica’s integrated proteome-wide drug discovery platform, and will expand its application within the pharma industry. It will also support expansion into adjacent sectors, such as agro-chemicals.
The financing will accelerate Cyclica’s commercial strategy to create and own hundreds of drug discovery programs across multiple therapeutic areas. These programs are created via spin outs and joint ventures with top tier research institutions, facilitated largely through the Cyclica Academic Partnership Program (“CAPP”).
Propelled by a rapidly growing portfolio of more than 30 active and advancing drug discovery programs, Cyclica will continue to spark innovation through a combination of venture creation and partnerships with early-stage and emerging biotech companies. Recent partnerships include EntheogeniX Biosciences, NineteenGale Therapeutics, Rosetta Therapeutics, the Rare Diseases Medicine Accelerator, a joint venture with Mannin Research, and two stealth JVs encompassing over 50 programs across multiple therapeutic areas.
Srinivas Rao, MD, PhD, CEO of EntheogeniX Biosciences and CSO of ATAI Life Sciences had this to say: “Cyclica’s computational platform shaved many months off of our timeline, and allowed us to achieve our objective of generating completely novel, synthetically tractable lead-like compounds. The flexibility, speed, and passion of the Cyclica team around drug design is readily apparent, and this enthusiasm has been a key driver of our rapid development.”
“What attracted us to Cyclica was their creative and unique business model,” said Molly Bonakdapour, Partner at Drive Capital. “They’ve created a diversified portfolio of assets across therapeutic indications through a partnership model. At the same time, they continue to collaborate with multinational companies. These companies represent strategic partnership options for the Cyclica portfolio. Cyclica is enabling world-class biotech companies while increasing their probability of success.”
“At the very core of Cyclica’s ethos is the steadfast desire to help patients by advancing the discovery and development of better medicines by taking a holistic yet personalized approach,” said Naheed Kurji, Co-Founder, President and CEO of Cyclica. “We are driving this ambitious vision forward by partnering with hyper innovative biotech companies that are rooted in sound science, and we are enabling them with our platform, our team of applied scientists, and our network of external partners. By creating new companies through spin-outs and joint ventures and helping them scale, we are in effect creating the biotech pipeline of the future.
About Cyclica
Cyclica is the first company to approach polypharmacology with a structure-based, AI-augmented in silico discovery platform, centred on Ligand Design and Ligand Express. Powered by MatchMaker™ a proprietary deep learning proteome screening technology, and POEM™, an innovative supervised learning technology for predicting molecular properties, Cyclica’s platform is suited uniquely to the design of novel, drug-like chemical matter by simultaneously prioritizing compounds based on their on- and off-target polypharmacological profiles as well as their developmental properties. With a world-class team that has deep roots in the industry, a first-in-class platform, and an innovative decentralized partnership model, Cyclica is creating medicines with greater precision for unmet patient needs.
About GreenSky Capital Inc.
GreenSky Capital Inc. is an award-winning Toronto-based firm that makes investments in early-stage Canadian technology companies through its affiliated venture capital funds, GreenSky Accelerator Fund I, II and III. Our principals bring a combination of experience in technology, entrepreneurship, law and finance to high-growth potential companies and dedicated entrepreneurs. Learn more about GreenSky at greenskycapital.com.
