$6.9m boost for Ignota Labs’ SAFEPATH AI platform

Cambridge-based AI-driven drug turnaround company Ignota Labs has closed a $6.9million seed funding round co-led by Montage Ventures and AIX Ventures.

The funding will be used to expand the pipeline by acquiring additional distressed assets and for advancement into early-stage clinical trials of their first asset, a PDE9A inhibitor.

Incorporated in 2021, Ignota identifies promising drug candidates that have been abandoned due to safety concerns – typically 80-90 per cent of the way to success – and uses its SAFEPATH platform to determine the underlying issues and develop solutions. SAFEPATH combines cheminformatics, bioinformatics, and multimodal data analysis to explain why and how safety issues occur, delivering actionable insights to refine or repurpose drug candidates. The platform not only reduces development timelines by years and costs by millions, but also offers multi-billion-dollar potential for each recovered therapy.

“Ignota Labs is solving one of the most critical challenges in drug development, rescuing promising therapies that would otherwise be abandoned due to safety issues,” said Todd Kimmel, founder and managing partner, Montage Ventures. “Their SAFEPATH platform represents a groundbreaking approach, combining cutting-edge AI with deep scientific expertise to address the root causes of drug toxicity. We believe Ignota Labs has the ability to enable more drugs to make it to the clinic and get to the patients who need them.”

Krish Ramadurai, partner at AIX Ventures, added: “Their approach shifts biopharmaceutical R&D from trial-and-error to a rational, data-driven process, enabling molecules to be precisely refined at scale to accelerate clinical development. I’m incredibly excited about their potential to transform AI-driven drug discovery and unlock massive value from previously failed assets to improve patient outcomes.”

Ignota Labs is founded by a multidisciplinary team with expertise across machine learning, drug discovery, and drug development and commercialisation.

CEO and co-founder Sam Windsor previously worked on DeepMind’s AlphaFold team and has a decade of experience in life sciences. Chief scientific officer Jordan Lane has advanced five assets to clinical development, and chief data science officer Layla Hosseini-Gerami is an expert on AI and cheminformatics.

“We’re thrilled to have the support of this leading investor syndicate in our mission to rescue promising yet struggling drugs with our technology,” said Sam Windsor, CEO and co-founder, Ignota Labs. “Traditional safety assessments reveal when something is wrong, but our platform goes a step further by identifying the exact molecular and biological issues to provide actionable insights to re-engineer and revive therapies.

“With this funding, we can expand our efforts to salvage distressed assets and accelerate the delivery of life-saving therapies to patients.”