Inductive Bio Raises $25M Series A to Transform Small Molecule Drug Discovery with Industry-Wide AI Platform

Funding will accelerate company's work to democratize state-of-the-art AI models trained on a pre-competitive dataset to speed the successful development of life-saving therapies

NEW YORK, May 7, 2025 /PRNewswire/ -- Inductive Bio, a technology company democratizing artificial intelligence (AI) models to transform small molecule drug discovery, announced today that it has raised $25M in Series A financing led by Obvious Ventures with participation from Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) Bio + Health, Lux Capital, S32, Character, and Amino Collective, alongside angel investors including Oren Etzioni, Jeff Hammerbacher, Malay Gandhi, and Jakob Uszkoreit.

The funding comes at an inflection point for the pharmaceutical industry, which faces pressure on multiple fronts: increasingly scarce early-stage funding, growing competition from Chinese biotech companies, and a traditional drug discovery process that remains inefficient and expensive. One of the biggest bottlenecks in the preclinical drug discovery process is the enormous amount of time and money needed to balance a drug's potency with the critical properties of absorption, distribution, metabolism, excretion, and toxicity (ADMET).

Inductive's approach centers around its pre-competitive data consortium, where multiple companies contribute anonymized data in a secure IP-protected environment, creating a foundational dataset that allows AI models to learn from thousands of real-world drug discovery programs. The resulting insights power Inductive's Compass platform, which predicts a drug's ADMET properties before a molecule is synthesized — guiding chemists towards molecules with the highest likelihood of success.

"Designing compounds with optimal ADMET properties is a fundamental challenge in drug discovery. This is where predictive AI tools can have a real impact," said Brock Shireman, SVP of small molecule drug discovery at Rapport Therapeutics. "By accurately predicting ADMET properties in real time, Inductive's platform helps our chemistry team design higher-quality compounds before investing resources in complex synthesis."

Since its launch a year ago, Inductive's Compass software has rapidly scaled to support dozens of active small-molecule drug programs across diverse therapeutic areas. Medicinal chemists have already explored over 1 million molecule designs in the platform. In a recent collaboration with Nested Therapeutics, published in ACS Medicinal Chemistry Letters, Inductive's platform helped efficiently resolve permeability and metabolic stability issues, contributing to the nomination of a drug development candidate with excellent cell potency and cross-species pharmacokinetics.

Today's funding announcement comes on the heels of the company's first-place finish in the inaugural Polaris ADMET competition, which evaluated AI models in a blinded, open challenge using a recently disclosed Coronavirus Main Protease drug program. Inductive's Beacon-1 model placed top among 38 other competitors from leading AI drug discovery companies and academic groups.

"In a tough funding environment and an increasingly competitive market, the rapid discovery of high-quality clinical candidates has never been more important for biopharma companies," said Josh Haimson, co-founder and CEO of Inductive Bio. "Traditional approaches for optimizing drug molecules are like playing a complex game of 'whack-a-mole' with dramatic consequences for the success or failure of a therapeutic program. Our platform's pre-competitive consortium allows the entire industry to benefit from the rapid advances being made in AI, dramatically accelerating the path to life-changing therapies that will benefit patients for centuries to come."

Inductive will use the funding to expand its AI model R&D, grow its pre-competitive data consortium and deploy its technology industry-wide, leveling the playing field for both innovative startups and large pharmaceutical companies. Longer-term, Inductive aims to launch an AI-native contract research organization (CRO) on top of this technology.

"What impressed us about Inductive is that they've moved beyond the hype of AI in drug discovery to deliver measurable results that are already changing how drugs are developed," said Rohan Ganesh, Partner at Obvious Ventures. "At Obvious, we believe AI is ushering in a new scientific method, accelerating innovation across fields like biotechnology and healthcare. Inductive embodies this shift, showing how these approaches can drive real-world breakthroughs that have the potential to fundamentally transform the economics and pace of drug development."

About Inductive Bio
Inductive Bio has developed a collaborative AI platform that dramatically accelerates compound optimization, a critical and time-consuming step in developing new therapeutics. By building a pre-competitive data consortium and state-of-the-art ML models designed to map the drivers of small molecule Absorption, Distribution, Metabolism, Excretion and Toxicity (ADMET), Inductive's platform allows scientists to optimize initial compounds into leads and development candidates faster and with a better balance of ADMET properties.

SOURCE Inductive Bio, Inc.