Following the successful close of its $12m Series A financing round, Persist AI has launched its Cloud Lab platform.
The novel AI-powered technology is designed to help pharmaceutical companies to rapidly develop formulations and reduce material use.
Persist's technology facilitates the rapid prediction of good recipes and formulation performance using AI models, while utilising a robot to build and test each formulation.
To achieve this launch, Persist AI obtained Series A funding from Spero Ventures, who led the funding round.
Persist AI also bagged investments from MBX Capital, Shimadzu Future Innovation Fund managed by Global Brain Corporation, Eli Lilly & Company, SignalFire, Ford Street Capital, Purdue Ventures, Good AI Capital, Cartography Capital, Asymmetry Ventures, and existing investors 2048 Ventures, Innospark and YCombinator.
"Every drug that reaches the market depends on an optimal formulation," noted Sara Eshelman, General Partner at Spero Ventures.
"While the industry has heavily invested in AI and predictive tools across the drug development pipeline, formulation has remained a blind spot," she added.
To overcome this issue, Persist provided its service to a major pharmaceutical client, identifying a long-acting injectable formulation within two months.
This was achieved in a short timeframe by building and testing 700 formulations in a miniaturised robotic system — not only conserving valuable drugs but also enabling higher throughput testing.
"Persist was able to dramatically reduce both the time and cost of the development stage, ultimately lowering the hurdle for investment in next-generation therapeutics like long-acting injectables," stated Eshelman.
Persist AI's formulation testing technology is also suitable for tablets and capsules, topicals and standard injectables, highlighting its flexibility.
"AI is enabling pharma to discover new molecules faster than ever, but a molecule that has poor shelf life cannot become a drug product that sits on a shelf. Our mission is to convert these novel molecules into products, such as tablets and injections that patients can use," said Karthik Raman, CEO of Persist.
"By using our technology, pharmaceutical companies can predict its formulation, and then build and test it in the real world," he said.
With the money raised in the Series A funding round, Persist will join forces with Nivagen Pharmaceuticals to build a GMP manufacturing system for long-lasting injectables, as well as expand the robotic laboratory.