Developing a new drug is an arduous process that spans over a decade, involving extensive research, development, and rigorous clinical trials. There is a real urgency to expedite this process for the most complex and unsolved diseases of our age, such as Parkinson’s, lung cancer, or multiple sclerosis.
Causaly’s AI solution is specifically designed to untangle this complexity, empowering scientists to deeply understand the underlying disease biology.
Now, the London-based AI platform for biomedical research has closed $60 million in Series B funding. The round was led by ICONIQ Growth (that invested in Pigment and Builder.ai), with participation from returning investors – Index Ventures, Marathon Ventures, EBRD, Pentech Ventures, and Visionaries Club.
Strategic individuals, including Alex Gorsky (formerly Johnson & Johnson) and Olivier Pomel (Datadog), also participated in the round. It comes after the company recently tripled revenue and customers, now serving 12 of the top 20 pharma companies. The investment brings the total funding raised to $93 million and will be used to extend Causaly’s product lead and expand commercial relationships, enabling breakthrough therapeutic innovations faster than ever before.
“Recent advances in AI open completely new possibilities, and there is a great need for transparent AI systems that science leaders can trust,” said Yiannis Kiachopoulos, Co-founder and CEO of Causaly. “Knowledge is the lifeblood of research organisations, and we are committed to our mission to make it discoverable, working with our customers to make sense of their scientific data and apply insights to enable evidence-driven decisions.”
“We are excited to accelerate our platform investments and partner with our customers in ingesting proprietary data to truly transform the way that research is done today,” added Artur Saudabayev, Co-founder and CTO of Causaly.
Caroline Xie, general partner at ICONIQ Growth and newest member of the Causaly board of directors said, “Causaly stands out to us as a uniquely powerful and user-oriented platform applying AI to drive significant productivity gains and commercial impact for many major pharmaceutical companies today. We are thrilled to support the entire Causaly team in their mission to revolutionise the way scientists find, visualise, and collaborate on scientific evidence across pharma, life sciences, and beyond.”
“Causaly gives scientists the power to solve the world’s biggest challenges like never before. It is one of the clearest real-life applications of AI today,” said Carlos Gonzalez-Cadenas, Partner at Index Ventures. “Already rolled out by some of the world’s largest pharmaceutical companies, Causaly is actively accelerating biomedical research now. We’ve been truly impressed with the level of adoption by leading research organisations, who continue to rapidly expand spend on Causaly, underlying the impact the technology is already having on R&D.”
Redefines drug discovery and research with AI
Causaly was founded in 2016 by Yiannis Kiachopoulos and Artur Saudabayev in London. The company redefines the boundaries of human discovery by harnessing transformative AI technologies. Its unique AI platform is a powerful catalyst for the modern Life Sciences research organisation, reshaping how data is found, analysed, and applied in critical decision-making processes in drug discovery and development.
It uses a hybrid approach that combines a best-in-class knowledge graph with the latest advances in generative AI. With this approach, Causaly enables researchers to conduct deep, unbiased scientific exploration, with the level of reproducibility and agency that the process of scientific inquiry demands.
The technology is being adopted at scale by teams of researchers in diverse workflows from target identification to biomarker discovery, with customers including Gilead, Novo Nordisk, Regeneron, the Food and Drug Administration, and the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences. The result is a 10x productivity gain, novel discoveries, and a higher success rate of preclinical programs.
