Investors Are Betting Big On This AI Drug Discovery Company To Take Off — Do They Have What It Takes?
If AI can generate funny memes and surreal videos, can it supercharge pharmaceutical drug research? Well, maybe not your run-of-the-mill LLM, but with automation, machine learning, and other AI-flavored buzzwords in tow, investors are betting that a lesser-known firm called Recursion Pharmaceuticals has the recipe to “industrialize” drug discovery.
- The company’s proprietary Recursion OS platform, which builds “maps of biology and chemistry” to uncover “unknown areas of disease biology,” helps identify drug candidates and bring them to clinic faster.
- Recursion has at least eight candidates in trials — minting partnerships with pharma firms like Roche, Bayer, and Merck.
Betting big: Recursion stands to turn its mere $26M in revenue in Q3 (+127% year-over-year) into billions if it can produce a large number of promising drugs, but it has yet to bring one to market. And with the company reporting a $95M net loss over the same period, its $427.6M in cash and cash equivalents might need a top-up — assuring there’s imminent risk of dilution. No matter for retail investors, though: is up 37% to start the year.
We’ve been here before: Further, has experienced a boom and bust before. It’s down more than 69% since it went public in 2021 — and is still down 9% over the past year, even accounting for its most recent surge. Whether Recursion produces miracles or AI slop is a significant indicator of its future value, especially if AI speculation cools off.
