Drug-discovery startup Insilico Medicine has scored a whopping $225 million in a Series C funding round led by Warburg Pincus.

This comes roughly two years after the New York and Hong Kong-based startup raised $37 million in Series B funding. The company now boasts of more than $310 million in funding.

Qiming Venture Partners, Pavilion Capital, Eight Roads Ventures, Lilly Asia Ventures, Sinovation Ventures, BOLD Capital Partners, Formic Ventures, Baidu Ventures, and new investors including CPE, OrbiMed, Mirae Asset Capital, B Capital Group, Deerfield Management, Maison Capital, Lake Bleu Capital, President International Development Corporation, Sequoia Capital China and Sage Partners also participated in this round.

WHAT IT DOES

Insilico Medicine is focused on using machine learning and artificial intelligence for drug research. It has created tools that are able to generate synthetic biological and molecular data, perform disease target identification, and help predict clinical trial outcomes, according to its website.

The company is split into two pieces. The first is its AI drug discovery platform and corresponding services. The second the company describes as "developing its own pipeline of preclinical programs."

Also according to the company, it has recently been demonstrating its technology in the major pulmonary disease space.  

WHAT IT'S FOR

The new money will go towards building up the company's therapeutic programs, will the goal of eventually being used in human clinical trials. The company also plans to create new programs for novel and difficult targets and build up its AI for drug discovery capabilities.

"The artificial intelligence technologies we invented are now demonstrating impressive results in both biology and chemistry, delivering valuable and absolutely novel therapeutic assets with high probability of clinical success," said Alex Zhavoronkov, founder and CEO of Insilico Medicine, in a statement.

"We are pleased and proud to have gained the recognition and investment from some of the world's most reputable investors with strong expertise in the biopharmaceutical industry. With their support, we will continue to innovate and bring revolutionary solutions to the pharmaceutical industry."

MARKET SNAPSHOT

Drug discovery is a hot topic in the digital health world, and investors have taken notice. In March, fellow drug-discovery startup insitro scored $400 million in a Series C funding round.

Earlier this month, Valo, a tech-enabled drug discovery company, went public through a $2.8 million SPAC merger. This came just months after Valo scored $300 million in Series B funding.

Others in the space include XtalPi, which raised $319 million for AI drug research last year, Recursion Pharmaceutical, which landed $239 million and Atomwise, which landed $123 million last August.