NEW YORK — Canadian informatics firm Cyclica said on Wednesday that it has raised C$23 million (US$16.9 million) in a Series B financing round.
The round was led by Drive Capital and included Chiesi Farmaceutici, GreenSky Capital, and members of Cyclica's management team.
Cyclica said it will use the funds to continue development of its artificial intelligence-based proteome-wide drug discovery platform, as well as to expand the platform's application within the pharmaceutical industry and into additional markets including agriculture. Cyclica said the money will also help accelerate its strategy of creating new drug-discovery programs via spinouts and joint ventures with research institutions.
Cyclica's flagship technologies include MatchMaker, which combines molecular biophysics and deep learning to predict the binding of new drug molecules to proteins, and pareto-optimal embedded modeling — or POEM — a machine-learning algorithm for generating ADMET prediction models.
In 2016, Cyclica raised C$2.4 million in a Series A round.