Enveda Doubles Valuation to $2B in $311M Series E Round

Enveda has raised $311 million in a Series E round that values the AI-driven drug discovery startup at $2 billion — double the valuation it achieved just 12 months ago.

Catalio Capital Management led the round, with participation from Iconiq and other investors.

The Boulder, Colorado-based company uses artificial intelligence to discover new medicines hidden in the natural world. Its founding thesis: powerful drugs can be harnessed from plants and microbes rather than synthesized from scratch in a lab.

Viswa Colluru, an early employee of Recursion Pharmaceuticals, founded Enveda in 2019 to accelerate the discovery of these compounds using AI and other techniques.

The funding lands at a moment when no AI-discovered drug has yet won FDA approval. Enveda sits within a wave of companies working to push AI-discovered candidates into human clinical trials, betting that machine learning can shorten a drug development pipeline notorious for its cost and failure rate.

The startup is already testing several drugs in patients. Its clinical pipeline includes a candidate targeting severe skin conditions and another designed to help patients maintain weight loss after they stop taking GLP-1 medications — a therapeutic area that has drawn intense interest as blockbuster obesity drugs from Novo Nordisk and Eli Lilly reshape the market.

The doubling of Enveda's valuation in a year signals that investors remain willing to pay premium prices for AI-biotech platforms with molecules already in human trials, even as the industry awaits proof that AI-discovered drugs can clear regulatory approval.

The new capital gives Enveda runway to expand its clinical programs and advance additional nature-derived candidates toward human testing — the stage where the AI drug discovery field will ultimately be judged.