NEW YORK (GenomeWeb) – ReviveMed said today that it has closed a $1.5 million seed funding round to advance its artificial intelligence-driven metabolomics platform for drug discovery and development.
Rivas Capital led the round, which also included participation from several institutional investors including TechU, Team Builder Ventures, and WorldQuant Ventures.
A group of researchers led by Leila Pirhaji, founder and CEO of ReviveMed and former postdoc at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, published proof of concept for the company's technology in August 2016 in Nature Medicine, using Huntington's disease as a model.
"Metabolomics data provide a critical link between the activity of genes and proteins, and phenotypic behavior in normal and disease states," Pirhaji said in a statement. "However, despite its potential, metabolomics has been greatly underutilized due to the difficulty of identifying a large number of metabolites in each patient. Our platform for the first time enables the rapid, high-throughput, and cost-effective application of metabolic data to discover new disease mechanisms for drug discovery and, simultaneously metabolomic biomarkers to identify which patients stand to benefit by targeting the disease mechanism."
ReviveMed's initial internal discovery program is in metabolic diseases and focused specifically on non-alcohol fatty liver disease.
In connection with the financing, Rivas Capital Founder Carlos Gonzalez will join the ReviveMed board of directors.