Peptone raises £1.8m in seed funding led by Hoxton Ventures to advance its protein engineering platform
The seed round was led by Hoxton Ventures with backing from dRx Capital and Founders Factory.
Peptone builds computational molecular physics software and an AI-driven protein engineering operating system to accelerate pharmaceutical drug development. The firm works to reduce failure rates in early stage protein research for the healthcare sector.
Computational physics company Peptone has secured £1.8m in seed funding to advance its protein engineering operating system. The round was led by Hoxton Ventures, with participation from dRx Capital, Founders Factory, and several angel investors including Brent Hoberman.
Funds will be directed towards further developing the company technology to handle high-value protein targets and lower failure risks during early drug discovery. The firm has spent three years building its platform using massively parallel molecular simulations and reinforcement learning.
The business is currently engaging with major pharmaceutical players regarding potential partnerships as it scales its supercomputing capacity.
From the founder
"Our sole focus at Peptone is to embrace experimental failure and, in fact, acknowledge it as an absolutely vital stage in the process of getting the design of protein-based medicines right. Great science is always born out of failure. The reality is that drug discovery in Big Pharma sees only a small fraction of protein based drugs pass the preclinical stages due to their complexity. Pharma, just like any industry, is subject to the ‘power law’. A small number of innovative drugs generate disproportional benefits to patients and outsized capital returns. We are working on shifting this failure-to-success ratio in a meticulously predictable and repeatable way using the best computational methods and scalable data science. Only last week one of our clients produced a monoclonal antibody for which our platform suggested seven radical mutations. The said therapeutic protein got vastly improved. The probability of a human researcher being able to engineer this type of change is equal to 1/1,280,000,000. In layman terms you are four times more likely to win the Powerball lottery than to spontaneously find the solution our platform has identified in less than ten days. The business of protein therapeutics is a huge industry and as we grow and further develop our supercomputing capacity we can help make significant progress in the time to market for much sought-after protein-based treatments."
Kamil Tamiola
CEO and founder at Peptone
Investor perspective
"We are backing Peptone because Kamil and Matt are mission-driven founders who’ve made tackling this extremely difficult problem their life’s work. They’ve made excellent progress to date in their early pharma collaborations, and we see in them the potential to build a category defining AI-company for the drug development industry. We’re excited to join them on this journey and think we will see a lot of great news from them in the not too distant future."
Hussein Kanji
Partner, Hoxton Ventures
Use of funds
- 01Fund research and development
