NVTC Newsletter No. 2

Happy Tech Tuesday, and welcome to the NVTC weekly newsletter! Here you’ll find recent updates from the tech world, insightful articles related to startups and highlights from NV portfolio companies.

THIS WEEK’S FEATURES ⚡

⭐ Recursion – Phenomaps and disruptive pathways to drug discovery.

⭐ Something Smelly – The EV dilemma with relying on sulfuric acid.

⭐ Virtual Worlds – The blue bubble blues and a meta-mansion.

⭐ Venturing Out – What’s happening in a post-startup-craze market.

STARTUP HIGHLIGHT

When you think of life’s greatest unknowns, you might first think of outer space, with its infinite stars and galaxies. Or maybe you think of the ocean, with all its unexplored trenches. However, you likely don’t think of your own body. The truth is we know very little about the human body and the intricacies of cellular function. Recursion is building a powerful AI to change that and revolutionize drug discovery.

Recursion works with petabytes of data stored in “Phenomaps.” Phenomaps are basically biotech’s version of conspiracy boards, the walls with all the photos and yarn seen in crime shows. Scientists use deep learning to draw inferred relationships between data points. In this case, the data points are molecules. Recursion uses robots to do microscopy, enabling orders of magnitude more scale on experiments. This knowledge drives their AI testing and in vitro experiments.

Recursion currently has upwards of 50 drug programs and has partnered with Roche and Genentech to develop 40 more programs. The company completed an IPO in April 2021 and is currently in Phase II trials for multiple drugs, making significant headway on its mission to find better treatments faster and cheaper.