Inductive Bio announced today it has secured $25 million in Series A financing to advance its artificial intelligence platform for small molecule drug discovery. The funding round was led by Obvious Ventures with participation from Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) Bio + Health, Lux Capital, S32, Character, and Amino Collective, alongside notable angel investors including Oren Etzioni, Jeff Hammerbacher, Malay Gandhi, and Jakob Uszkoreit.
The New York-based company is tackling one of the most significant bottlenecks in preclinical drug discovery: the time-consuming and expensive process of optimizing a drug's absorption, distribution, metabolism, excretion, and toxicity (ADMET) properties while maintaining potency.
"In a tough funding environment and an increasingly competitive market, the rapid discovery of high-quality clinical candidates has never been more important for biopharma companies," said Josh Haimson, co-founder and CEO of Inductive Bio. "Traditional approaches for optimizing drug molecules are like playing a complex game of 'whack-a-mole' with dramatic consequences for the success or failure of a therapeutic program."
Pre-Competitive Data Consortium Drives AI Innovation
At the core of Inductive's approach is its pre-competitive data consortium, where multiple pharmaceutical companies contribute anonymized data in a secure, IP-protected environment. This collaborative model has created a foundational dataset that allows AI models to learn from thousands of real-world drug discovery programs.
The insights generated from this consortium power Inductive's Compass platform, which predicts ADMET properties before molecules are synthesized—guiding medicinal chemists toward compounds with the highest likelihood of success and potentially saving months of laboratory work.
Since launching a year ago, the Compass software has rapidly scaled to support dozens of active small-molecule drug programs across diverse therapeutic areas. Medicinal chemists have already explored over one million molecule designs using the platform.
Brock Shireman, SVP of small molecule drug discovery at Rapport Therapeutics, highlighted the platform's practical impact: "Designing compounds with optimal ADMET properties is a fundamental challenge in drug discovery. This is where predictive AI tools can have a real impact. By accurately predicting ADMET properties in real time, Inductive's platform helps our chemistry team design higher-quality compounds before investing resources in complex synthesis."
Proven Results in Real-World Drug Development
The company's approach has already demonstrated tangible results. In a recent collaboration with Nested Therapeutics, published in ACS Medicinal Chemistry Letters, Inductive's platform helped efficiently resolve permeability and metabolic stability issues, contributing to the nomination of a drug development candidate with excellent cell potency and cross-species pharmacokinetics.
Further validating its technology, Inductive recently placed first in the inaugural Polaris ADMET competition, which evaluated AI models in a blinded, open challenge using a recently disclosed Coronavirus Main Protease drug program. The company's Beacon-1 model outperformed 38 other competitors from leading AI drug discovery companies and academic groups.
"What impressed us about Inductive is that they've moved beyond the hype of AI in drug discovery to deliver measurable results that are already changing how drugs are developed," said Rohan Ganesh, Partner at Obvious Ventures. "At Obvious, we believe AI is ushering in a new scientific method, accelerating innovation across fields like biotechnology and healthcare."
Addressing Industry-Wide Challenges
The funding comes at a critical inflection point for the pharmaceutical industry, which faces multiple pressures: increasingly scarce early-stage funding, growing competition from Chinese biotech companies, and the inherent inefficiencies of traditional drug discovery processes.
Inductive aims to use the new capital to expand its AI model research and development, grow its pre-competitive data consortium, and deploy its technology industry-wide. The company believes this approach will level the playing field for both innovative startups and large pharmaceutical companies.
Looking ahead, Inductive plans to launch an AI-native contract research organization (CRO) built on its technology platform, potentially transforming how contract research is conducted in the pharmaceutical industry.
Haimson emphasized the broader vision: "Our platform's pre-competitive consortium allows the entire industry to benefit from the rapid advances being made in AI, dramatically accelerating the path to life-changing therapies that will benefit patients for centuries to come."
