Pharmatech startup Aqemia has just raised €30 million in a new funding round. The Parisian startup is generating a pioneering drug discovery pipeline that aims to design fast drugs for critical diseases through an AI-powered process that allows drug discovery projects to be scaled like tech projects.
One of the core challenges in western medicine is to find the drugs that will treat the diseases of tomorrow, at scale and at a fast pace. We all know far too well the challenge and amount of work it takes to create pharmaceuticals, and we all know far too well the importance of having access to drugs for people’s lives right across the world.
Taking a fresh approach to discovery, driven by the desire to design fast innovative drug candidates for dozens of critical diseases, is French startup Aqemia. The startup has just raised new funding to scale its tech-enabled platform.
Funding details
The €30 million Series A round was led by Eurazeo and Bpifrance through its Large Venture fund, with the participation of Elaia, its historic investor.
Maximilien Levesque, Co-founder and CEO of Aqemia: “We are thrilled to welcome Eurazeo and Bpifrance’s Large Venture fund onboard, as they are known for investing in the finest French scale-ups, and to receive again backing from Elaia, the first French Deeptech VC investor”
Founded in 2019, the startup has already grown swiftly, going from a spin-off of Ecole Normale Superieure to an A-team of 50 people at the crossroads of Chemistry and Artificial Intelligence, and has built its innovation engine – Aqemia’s Launchpad.
Laurent Higueret, Senior Investment Director at Bpifrance’s Large Venture fund: “Early drug discovery is a long, costly and cumbersome process with often unsatisfactory outcomes for sponsors and ultimately patients. Aqemia’s ambition is to change all that by bringing together deep physics and AI into a powerful computational engine that has the potential to generate promising new development candidates at scale. Through this investment, we are thrilled to be part of this exciting journey and further expand Bpifrance portfolio in deeptech and AI.”
Drug discovery at scale
Based in Paris, Aqemia is on a mission to massively scale drug discovery, through a first-in-class technological platform combining quantum-inspired physics and machine learning.
Unlike AI-based platforms that need experimental data to train on, Aqemia addresses drug discovery projects from their earliest stage by generating its own data using unique quantum physics algorithms derived from 12 years of research at the University of Cambridge and Oxford (UK), and École Normale Supérieure and CNRS.
The aim is to optimize the drug discovery process, enabling dozens of proprietary new drug candidates to be uncovered. Those candidates will fuel a diversified therapeutic pipeline across a variety of targets and indications that Aqemia intends to advance into clinical trials alone through a constellation of Biotech spin-offs or with partners as the case may be.
Emmanuelle Martiano, Co-Founder & COO of Aqemia: “The unprecedented pace – a whopping 10,000x faster while maintaining costs – and accuracy of our deep physics algorithms, adding up to our generative AI, creates a unique combination that permits to generate innovative new drug candidates more quickly, and scale drug discovery projects as technology projects.
The startup has also developed its own innovation engine – the Launchpad. It’s already proven successful in several disclosed and undisclosed collaborations worth up to millions of euros with leading pharmaceutical companies such as Sanofi, Janssen and Servier. This unique technology has resulted in the launch of a proprietary pipeline of several drug discovery projects, which now range from in vitro to in vivo phases, especially in oncology and immuno-oncology.
This new funding will be used to support the pharmatech team in its mission and influence the future of shrug discovery, for the betterment of society as a whole.
Maximilien Levesque, Cofounder and CEO of Aqemia: “After repeated successes in generating very efficiently innovative new chemical matter in collaboration with large pharmaceutical companies around the world, we are now excited to leverage this fundraising to accelerate towards Aqemia’s mission: build a massive pipeline of wholly-owned drug discovery projects.”
Antoine Zins, Investment Director at Eurazeo: “I strongly believe that Aqemia has unparalleled power to shift the drug discovery paradigm. They have not only solved the missing data paradox in the discovery process with deep physics and AI, they can also generate leads at a faster pace than any discovery platform before them. We are very excited to be part of the adventure by their side”.
