London-based Ignota Labs, an AI-driven drug turnaround company, today announced the close of a €6.6 million Seed funding round, to advance into early-stage clinical trials of their first asset, a PDE9A inhibitor.
The round was co-led by Montage Ventures and AIX Ventures with participation from Modi Ventures, Blue Wire Capital, and Gaingels.
“We’re thrilled to have the support of this leading investor syndicate in our mission to rescue promising yet struggling drugs with our technology,” said Sam Windsor, CEO and Co-founder, Ignota Labs. “Traditional safety assessments reveal when something is wrong, but our platform goes a step further by identifying the exact molecular and biological issues to provide actionable insights to re-engineer and revive therapies. With this funding, we can expand our efforts to salvage distressed assets and accelerate the delivery of life-saving therapies to patients.”
Founded in 2021 by Sam Windsor, Dr Layla Hosseini-Gerami, and Dr Jordan Lane, Ignota Labs specialises in rescuing promising but failing drugs.
CEO Sam Windsor previously worked on DeepMind’s AlphaFold team and has a decade of experience in life sciences. Chief Scientific Officer Jordan Lane has advanced five assets to clinical development, and Chief Data Science Officer Layla Hosseini-Gerami is an expert on AI and cheminformatics.
According to Ignota Labs, more than half of all clinical trials fail due to safety issues, preventing over 56% of drugs from reaching patients and resulting in a €381.5 billion annual loss.
Their proprietary platform, SAFEPATH, uses deep learning to address these challenges by uncovering the mechanisms behind drug toxicity. Instead of identifying what went wrong, their AI platform combines cheminformatics, bioinformatics, and multimodal data analysis to explain why and how safety issues occur, delivering actionable insights to refine or repurpose drug candidates.
The company identifies promising drug candidates that have been abandoned due to safety concerns – typically 80-90% of the way to success – and uses SAFEPATH to determine the underlying issues and develop solutions.
“Ignota Labs is solving one of the most critical challenges in drug development, rescuing promising therapies that would otherwise be abandoned due to safety issues,” said Todd Kimmel, Founder and Managing Partner, Montage Ventures. “Their SAFEPATH platform represents a groundbreaking approach, combining cutting-edge AI with deep scientific expertise to address the root causes of drug toxicity. We believe Ignota Labs has the ability to enable more drugs to make it to the clinic and get to the patients who need them.”
“Ignota is redefining drug development and pioneering a new era of predictive and engineerable biology—where AI systematically de-risks therapeutic development by designing safer, more effective drugs with precision,” said Krish Ramadurai, Partner at AIX Ventures. “Their approach shifts biopharmaceutical R&D from trial-and-error to a rational, data-driven process, enabling molecules to be precisely refined at scale to accelerate clinical development. I’m incredibly excited about their potential to transform AI-driven drug discovery and unlock massive value from previously failed assets to improve patient outcomes.”
The company successfully in-licensed its first asset, a first-in-class metabolic health drug with the potential to improve the lives of over 1.2 billion post-menopausal women. Using SAFEPATH, Ignota Labs resolved safety concerns that halted the drug’s progress, validating its findings through rodent models.
Read the orginal article: https://www.eu-startups.com/2025/02/rescuing-drugs-ignota-labs-raises-e6-6-million-to-turn-around-failed-drugs/
