Octant, an Emeryville, CA-based data-driven therapeutics company, raised $80M in Series B funding.
The round was led by Catalio Capital Management with participation from Bristol Myers Squibb, Andreessen Horowitz Bio Fund, Allen & Co., and 50 Years VC. Catalio’s co-Founder and Managing Partner, George Petrocheilos, and Head of Research, Dr. Diamantis Xylas, are joining the Board as Director and Board Observer, respectively.
The company, which has raised $115m in total funding, intends to use the funds to further expand its platform capabilities and pipeline, advance its proprietary drug discovery technology, and generate extensive datasets that map the relationships between drug candidates, genetics, and the biochemical mechanisms of human cells, develop multiple additional therapeutic programs in small molecule chaperone therapies for rare genetic diseases.
Led by Sri Kosuri, Sc.D., Chief Executive Officer, and Rick Artis, Chief Scientific Officer, Octant is a therapeutics company integrating experimental technologies (multiplexed measurements and high-throughput synthetic chemistry) with computation to solve complex challenges in drug discovery. The company engineers drugs with novel mechanisms of actions guided by extensive proprietary datasets in engineered human cells that unlock insights between genomes, drug candidates, biochemical function, and disease phenotypes. The platform uses synthetic biology, high throughput multiplexed assays, synthetic chemistry, and computation to engineer and interrogate drugs, proteins, and cellular pathways at unprecedented scales.
Octant also announced a collaboration with Bristol Myers Squibb. Under the collaboration agreement, Octant will apply its DMS technologies to a set of inflammation-related pathways.
FinSMEs