South Korea startup Standigm secures $11.5 million Series B to scale its AI-powered drug pipelines toward license-out

Not so many people know what it takes to bring new drug to market. Drugs can take a decade of research and over a billion dollars’ worth of development before they reach the market. Resources are wasted in the pre-discovery phase through a trial and error process that yields more error than success. There are hidden insights in biomedical data, waiting to be discovered and to lead towards promising drug candidates. Unfortunately, these patterns are too complex and diffuse to be detected by the human mind. This is the problem that Standigm, a tech startup using artificial intelligence (AI) technology for drug discovery and development, is aiming to solve.

To achieve its vision to ease the pains of patients all over the world, Standigm announced today it has raised $11.5 million in a Series B funding to scale the AI technology platforms and advance its drug discovery pipelines toward license-out. The new round, which was led by Mirae Asset Venture Investment and Mirae Asset Capital, brings Standigm’s total financing to $15 million. Other backers include Kakao Ventures, Atinum Investment, DSC Investment, LB Investment, Wonik Investment Partners, as well as Mirae Asset Venture Investment and Mirae Asset Capital. Kakao Ventures, one of the leading early-stage VCs in Asia, continued to invest Standigm since its seed round.

Founded in 2015 by experts in artificial intelligence and systems biology at Samsung Advanced Institute of Technology, the Seoul, South Korea-based Standigm has grown into a team of elite researchers, composed of 50% PhDs with multi-disciplinary expertise in chemistry, biology, pharmacology, and high-performance algorithms and data structures. Standigm is a drug discovery company that searches therapeutic lead compounds by using advanced artificial intelligence (AI) trained on biomedical big data. We design lead molecules and predict targets and pathways of untreatable diseases and find new indications of existing drugs with the ensemble of 8 different AI models and a comprehensive graphic knowledge database.

“We have been very impressed with the progress Standigm has made over the past years in global drug discovery market,” said Kijun Kim, Vice President in Kakao Ventures. “The feasibility of Standigm AI is already acknowledged among the leading pharmaceutical companies. We’re pleased to continue our support. This will allow standigm to broaden its own pipelines.”

Launching three platforms, Standigm BEST®, Standigm Insight®, and Standigm Expander®, Standigm has provided lead optimization, novel target analysis, and new indication prediction services to pharmaceutical companies including four global leading pharmaceutical companies. Standigm has developed extensive preclinical pipelines in four different disease areas: NASH, Parkinson’s disease, Autism, and Mitochondrial diseases.

Jinhan Kim, CEO and Co-founder in Standigm, said, “We demonstrated in vitro and in vivo data of our repurposing drug candidates. This latest round from top investors and innovators in AI and biotechnology fields represents their confidence in our technology to innovate drug discovery process in the pharmaceutical industry. We will create partnerships with leading healthcare organizations to accelerate this mission and bolster our pipelines.”