Venrock’s Camille Samuels is joining us to judge Startup Battlefield at Disrupt 2021

The team at TechCrunch is preparing for another epic Startup Battlefield competition this year at Disrupt 2021 on September 21-23 and we’re assembling a superstar team of judges that will choose the winner who gets to take home $100K and the Disrupt Cup. We’re thrilled to have Venrock’s Camille Samuels join us as one of our esteemed Battlefield judges at our second virtual Startup Battlefield.

Samuels is a partner at Venrock, building out the team’s investments in the healthcare world, focusing specifically on plays in biotech, medical devices and consumer health. Some recent bets include Unity Biotechnology, Iris Medicine and Biolux. Samuels joined Venrock in 2014 after 12 years at healthcare-centric firm Versant Ventures. Before the start of her 20+ year career in venture, Samuels worked in business development at drug discovery company Tularik and had stints in corporate development at Genzyme and Millennium Predictive Medicine.

When we spoke with Samuels early last year she talked about her interests in technology that could keep people healthier for longer. “In general, the big idea of improving health span is what really interests me. I want us to extend out the years that we can be healthy and happy versus on medication and decrepit,” she told us.

It’s been a big year for Venrock, which recently closed its ninth fund with $450 million; the firm’s latest exits include last year’s IPOs of Cloudflare and 10x Genomics.

Disrupt 2021 runs September 21-23 and will be 100% virtual this year. Get your pass to attend with the rest of the TechCrunch community for less than $100 if you secure your seat before next month.

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Source: Tech Crunch

Molecule.one grows its drug synthesis AI platform with a $4.6M seed round

Polish computational chemistry outfit Molecule.one has raised $4.6M to expand its quest to bring theoretical drug molecules to reality. Its machine learning systems predict the best ways to synthesize potentially valuable molecules, a crucial part of creating new drugs and treatments.

Molecule.one went on stage at Disrupt SF 2019’s Startup Battlefield, where they explained the difficulty faced by the drug discovery industry, basically that they come up with lots of theoretical treatments but can’t actually make the molecules.

The company’s system enters play when you have some exotic new compound you want to make in order to test it in real life, but don’t know how to make it. After all, these molecules are brand new to science — no one has created them before, so why should anyone know? Molecule.one creates a workflow starting with ordinary off-the-shelf chemicals and provides step by step instructions using known methods of how to go from A to B… and to C, D, and so on (it’s rarely simple).

The company leverages machine learning and a large body of knowledge about chemical reactions to create these processes, though as CSO Stanisław Jastrzębski explained, they do it backwards.

“Synthesis planning can be characterized as a game,” he said. “In each move of this game, instead of moving a piece on a board, we break a chemical bond between a pair of atoms. The goal of the game is to break down a target molecule to molecules that can then be bought on the market and used to synthesize the target. We use algorithms similar to the ones used by DeepMind to master Go or chess to find the synthesis pathway.”

Co-founders Piotr Byrski and Paweł Włodarczyk-Pruszyński note that predicting organic reactions is no cakewalk, and that they have dedicated a great deal of resources towards making their system efficient and verifiable. The theoretical pathways they produce seem plausible but still need to be tested, something they do regularly internally so companies see that Molecule.one just selling good ideas but workable ones.

Since their debut at Disrupt, the company has acquired a number of customers with annual contracts, Byrski said, and rolled out lots of features on the platform. Włodarczyk-Pruszyński said that their efficiency has increased as well.

Molecule.one founders Piotr Byrski and Paweł Włodarczyk-Pruszyński in a lab.

Image Credits: Molecule.one

“Our system has matured and we have extended our platform to support planning synthesis for thousands of molecules per hour,” he said. “This feature is incredibly useful when combined with AI systems for drug discovery that generate huge numbers of candidate drug molecules. All these improvements helped us gain trust in the industry and initiate collaborations with relevant parties.”

Certainly the problem becomes one of scaling as your customers start asking about pathways for hundreds of thousands of possible therapeutic molecules rather than a handful. For them, if they are to bear the manufacturing cost, it’s worth the outlay at the start to see if one of the compounds they’re looking at is considerably easier to make than another with a similar effect. Without simulating the entire process that’s difficult to say for sure, so they can just send the list to Molecule.one and get the report back a few days later.

Screenshot of the Molecule.one interface, showing chemical structures.

Image Credits: Molecule.one

The team can’t share any of their customers’ successes (though presumably there have been some) because of course all this work is highly confidential. But they did say that like many companies in biotech they are doing what they can to support COVID-related therapies.

“We made part of our platform free to eligible researchers working on COVID drug discovery. This has resulted in a lasting collaboration with the LambdaZero project at MILA, which is advised by Prof. Yoshua Bengio,” said Byrski.

This also offered the opportunity to test their new scaling methods, since for such a project many candidate molecules must be evaluated, not just for efficacy but the capability of being manufactured easily.

“We are incredibly excited about this area in general because it enables traversing novel regions of the chemical space, which offers enormous promise in terms of looking for drugs that have not yet been synthesized,” Byrski said.

The funding round was led by Atmos Ventures, with a long list of participating investors: AME Cloud Ventures, Cherubic Ventures, Firlej Kastory, Inventures, Luminous Ventures, Sunfish Partners, and individuals including Bayer executive Sebastian Guth.

The company plans to use the money to expand the team and continue expanding generally; it also has a plan to open new offices in the U.S. and Western Europe (they’re based in Poland).


Source: Tech Crunch

Former head of Alphabet’s Loon joins Starship Technologies as new CEO

Autonomous robotics company Starship Technologies has a new CEO. The company on Tuesday said Alastair Westgarth, the former CEO of Alphabet’s Loon, would be leading the company as it looks to expand its robotics delivery service.

Westgarth previously headed Loon, Alphabet’s experiment to deliver broadband via high-altitude balloons, from 2017. The project shut down for good at the beginning of this year. The company said in a farewell blog post that “the road to commercial viability has proven much longer and riskier than hoped.” Prior to working at Loon, Westgarth headed the wireless antennae company Quintel Solutions, was a vice president at telecommunications company Nortel and director of engineering at Bell Mobility.

He will be joining Starship Technologies at a time of rapid expansion. At the beginning of 2020, Starship only had a couple hundred autonomous bots operating in a few neighborhoods and college campuses. Last month the company said the number of deliveries since the start of the pandemic quadrupled, hitting a milestone 1.5 million commercial deliveries globally.

“Autonomous delivery is changing logistics as we know it, impacting billions of people around the world,” Westgarth said in a statement Tuesday. “The team at Starship has been developing and perfecting the technology and its operations for years, since creating the robot delivery category in 2014 […] I’m excited about this opportunity and looking forward to helping the company scale both on campuses and in neighborhoods, giving millions more people access to this market-leading, convenient, safe and environmentally friendly delivery service.”

Starship’s previous CEO Lex Bayer quietly departed in December 2020, after nearly three years at the helm. Its co-founder Ahti Heinla, who acted as interim CEO, will now become Starship’s CTO.


Source: Tech Crunch