Recursion Pharmaceuticals
Recursion Pharmaceuticals, co-founded by Chris Gibson and launched in late 2013, uses automation, computation, and biology to find new uses for drugs that large pharma partners could not bring to market. It earns money now through partnership deals with milestones and royalties, while its internal pipeline is about eight months from clinical trials. The company had about 40 people at the time of the interview, and Gibson said first-year revenue was in the six figures without giving an exact number.
Chris Gibson set out to shortcut the long, costly path of drug discovery by combining biology, automation, and computation to screen existing drugs at scale. The company focuses on finding new uses for drugs that pharma partners shelved, which the source calls sunk assets.
- •Partnering with pharma companies on drugs they already own turns sunk, shelved assets into revenue without Recursion bearing the cost of developing the original compound.
- •Earning milestones and royalties on partnered drugs means revenue can grow with each successful deal, rather than depending on one-time fees.
- •Running screens across hundreds of diseases in parallel lets the platform generate many deal opportunities from a single asset library, which makes the partnership model scalable.
- •Investors who treated the company as a technology platform rather than a traditional biotech helped it raise capital, which funded the data science and engineering work needed before revenue arrived.
- 1.Identify large companies that have invested heavily in compounds that failed for business or efficacy reasons rather than safety, since those assets can be repositioned.
- 2.Build a screening platform that tests existing compounds against many indications in parallel to find unexpected new uses.
- 3.Structure deals to combine upfront fees, option and maintenance fees, development milestones, and royalties so revenue arrives at several points in the cycle.
- 4.Bring in outside patent and deal counsel early to handle complex contract terms and deal strategy.
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AI-extracted from the linked source. Monthly revenue can include one-time sales or donations, and may describe a later stage than the first-customer story.