Enveda, a Boulder, Colorado drug developer, has raised $311 million in a Series E that doubles its valuation to $2 billion. Catalio Capital Management led the round. New investors include Durable Capital Partners, ICONIQ, Lightspeed, Surveyor Capital (a Citadel company), T. Rowe Price, Digitalis Ventures and Alderline Group. Baillie Gifford, Premji Invest, Kinnevik, Lux Capital and other existing backers came back in. Enveda has now raised more than $845 million.
Its thesis is old and new at once. Many important drugs, aspirin and morphine among them, came from plants and microbes. The trouble has always been that nature’s chemistry is enormous and mostly uncharted. “The most reliable source of new medicines is the chemistry that living things have been refining for billions of years,” says founder and CEO Viswa Colluru.
PRISM, the mapping engine
Enveda’s platform is called PRISM. It’s an AI foundation model that works from mass spectrometry data. It identifies bioactive molecules in natural samples, predicts their structures and ranks them by how likely they are to become a therapy. Since 2019 it has produced 17 development candidates. That’s a fast pace for a company making small-molecule drugs from scratch.
Three drugs in the clinic
- ENV-294 for atopic dermatitis (eczema) and asthma, now moving into Phase 2 after strong Phase 1b results.
- ENV-308 for metabolic health and weight management, with Phase 1 complete.
- ENV-6946 for inflammatory bowel disease, in Phase 1.
The new money pushes those three into later-stage trials. It also brings more candidates into the clinic for inflammatory and metabolic disease and expands PRISM itself. Most AI drug discovery companies are still waiting on their first clinical proof. Enveda has three shots on goal already, and investors just paid up for that.