Enveda secures $311M to bring more nature-derived AI drugs into clinical trials | TechCrunch

Enveda just closed a $311 million Series E round, pushing its valuation to $2 billion—double what it was a year ago. Catalio Capital led the funding, with Iconiq also participating. The company uses AI to hunt for drug candidates in plants and microbes rather than synthesizing them from scratch. Viswa Colluru, who worked early on at Recursion Pharmaceuticals, started Enveda in 2019 with this exact premise: AI could accelerate the discovery process and unlock molecules that nature already made. The startup is actually moving candidates into human trials, which puts it ahead of most AI drug discovery hype. They're testing several drugs in patients right now. One targets severe skin conditions. Another is designed to help people maintain weight loss after they stop taking GLP-1 drugs—a practical problem given how many people use those medications and then regain weight. No AI-discovered drug has gotten FDA approval yet, but Enveda is among the companies trying to change that. The bet here is straightforward: nature has already done a lot of the chemistry work. Microbes and plants produce thousands of bioactive compounds that humans have barely catalogued, let alone tested systematically. AI can screen through that biological library far faster than traditional methods. Whether Enveda's approach actually produces better drugs than conventional pharma remains an open question, but the funding shows investors believe it's worth finding out.