Recursion Announces Collab­o­ra­tion and $50 Million Investment from NVIDIA to Accelerate Ground­breaking Foundation Models in AI-Enabled Drug Discovery

Companies to collaborate on software for biotech and phar­ma­ceu­tical companies to create improved patient treatments faster

SALT LAKE CITY, TORONTO and MONTRÉAL, July 12, 2023 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) — Recursion (NASDAQ: RXRX), a leading clinical stage TechBio company decoding biology to indus­tri­alize drug discovery, today announced a $50 million investment by NVIDIA, which was executed as a private investment in public equity (PIPE). Recursion also announced plans to accelerate development of its AI foundation models for biology and chemistry, which, in collab­o­ra­tion with NVIDIA, it intends to optimize and distribute to biotech­nology companies using NVIDIA cloud services.

“Our collab­o­ra­tion with NVIDIA represents two best-in-class companies coming together to help solve one of the world’s most difficult challenges, drug discovery,” said Chris Gibson, Ph.D., Co-founder and CEO of Recursion. ​“With our powerful dataset and NVIDIA’s accelerated computing capa­bil­i­ties, we intend to create ground­breaking foundation models in biology and chemistry at a scale unlike anything that has ever been released in the biological space.”

Recursion plans to utilize its vast proprietary biological and chemical dataset, which exceeds 23 petabytes and 3 trillion searchable gene and compound rela­tion­ships, to accelerate the training of foundation models on NVIDIA DGX™ Cloud for possible commercial license/release on BioNeMo, NVIDIA’s cloud service for generative AI in drug discovery. NVIDIA will also help optimize and scale Recursion foundation models leveraging the NVIDIA AI stack and NVIDIA’s full-stack computing expertise. BioNeMo was announced earlier this year as a cloud service for generative AI in drug discovery, offering tools to quickly customize and deploy domain-specific, state-of-the-art biomol­e­c­ular models at-scale through cloud APIs. Recursion anticipates using this software to support its internal pipeline as well as its current and future partners.

“Generative AI is a revo­lu­tionary tool to discover new medicines and treatments,” said Jensen Huang, founder and CEO of NVIDIA. ​“We are delighted to collaborate with Recursion’s world-class team, which is doing pioneering work in digital biology and chemistry with NVIDIA DGX and NVIDIA AI software to accelerate the development of the world’s largest biomol­e­c­ular generative AI models and speed drug discovery for biotech and pharmaceutical companies.”

Recursion, through its recent acquisition of Valence Discovery, aims to accelerate the development of new tech­nolo­gies to feed the biopharma industry, while simul­ta­ne­ously democ­ra­tizing access to large-scale models that have maximum impact in drug discovery.

About Recursion
Recursion (NASDAQ: RXRX) is a clinical stage TechBio company leading the space by decoding biology to indus­tri­alize drug discovery. Enabling its mission is the Recursion OS, a platform built across diverse tech­nolo­gies that contin­u­ously expands one of the world’s largest proprietary biological and chemical datasets. Recursion leverages sophis­ti­cated machine-learning algorithms to distill from its dataset a collection of trillions of searchable rela­tion­ships across biology and chemistry uncon­strained by human bias. By commanding massive exper­i­mental scale — up to millions of wet lab experiments weekly — and massive compu­ta­tional scale — owning and operating one of the most powerful super­com­puters in the world, Recursion is uniting technology, biology, and chemistry to advance the future of medicine.

Recursion is head­quar­tered in Salt Lake City, where it is a founding member of BioHive, the Utah life sciences industry collective. Recursion also has offices in Toronto, Montréal and the San Francisco Bay Area. Learn more at www.Recursion.com, or connect on Twitter and LinkedIn.

Forward-Looking Statements
This document contains information that includes or is based upon ​“forward-looking statements” within the meaning of the Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995, including, without limitation, those regarding the accel­er­a­tion and advancement of development of AI foundation models, as well as optimizing, licensing, and distrib­uting such models; using BioNeMo software to support Recursion’s internal pipeline and well as Recursion’s current and future industry partners; Recursion accel­er­ating development of new tech­nolo­gies through its Valence Discovery acquisition; and all other statements that are not historical facts. Forward-looking statements may or may not include identifying words such as ​“plan,” ​“will,” ​“expect,” ​“anticipate,” ​“intend,” ​“believe,” ​“potential,” ​“continue,” and similar terms. These statements are subject to known or unknown risks and uncer­tain­ties that could cause actual results to differ materially from those expressed or implied in such statements, including but not limited to: challenges inherent in phar­ma­ceu­tical research and development, including the timing and results of preclinical and clinical programs, where the risk of failure is high and failure can occur at any stage prior to or after regulatory approval due to lack of sufficient efficacy, safety consid­er­a­tions, or other factors; our ability to leverage and enhance our drug discovery platform; our ability to obtain financing for development activities and other corporate purposes; the success of our collab­o­ra­tion activities; our ability to obtain regulatory approval of, and ultimately commer­cialize, drug candidates; our ability to obtain, maintain, and enforce intel­lec­tual property protections; cyber­at­tacks or other disruptions to our technology systems; our ability to attract, motivate, and retain key employees and manage our growth; inflation and other macro­eco­nomic issues; and other risks and uncer­tain­ties such as those described under the heading ​“Risk Factors” in our filings with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, including our Annual Report on Form 10‑K. All forward-looking statements are based on management’s current estimates, projections, and assumptions, and Recursion undertakes no obligation to correct or update any such statements, whether as a result of new information, future devel­op­ments, or otherwise, except to the extent required by applicable law.