Exscientia completes $100 million Series C funding

RNS

AIM: FIPP

04 March 2021

Frontier IP Group Plc

("Frontier IP" or the "Group")

Portfolio news - Exscientia completes $100 million Series C funding round with BlackRock funds

Frontier IP, a specialist in commercialising intellectual property, notes today's announcement below from portfolio company Exscientia Limited ("Exscientia") concerning the successful completion of its Series C funding round.

As a result of the financing round, Frontier IP now holds a 2.11 per cent equity stake in Exscientia.  

Based on the Group's overall trading for the year to date and the outlook for the remainder of the financial year, the Board remains confident on the prospects for the year ended 30 June 2021.

Frontier IP expects to announce its interims results for the six months to 31 December 2020 on 24 March 2021.

Exscientia statement begins:

Exscientia completes $100 million Series C financing round with BlackRock funds.

Proceeds to further accelerate AI drug discovery platform and pipeline

OXFORD, 4th March 2021 - Exscientia, a clinical stage pharmatech pioneering the use of artificial intelligence (AI) to design new drugs, today announced that funds managed by BlackRock joined the Company's Series C investment round. Including existing Series C investors, Novo Holdings, Evotec, Bristol Myers Squibb, and GT Healthcare Capital, the round totalled $100 million in funding.

This new capital will be used to support Exscientia's platform development towards  autonomous drug design. In addition, the company will extend its proprietary pipeline into clinical trials and expand existing capabilities in biological analytics that support target selection and portfolio development.

With the company's end-to-end AI-first drug discovery platform, CentaurAI™, Exscientia has been able to generate novel drugs and overcome conventional drug discovery limitations several years faster than industry benchmarks. Exscientia has demonstrated the platform's capabilities by creating the first fully AI-designed drug to enter clinical trials and advancing multiple drug candidates into preclinical testing. In addition to its growing proprietary pipeline, the company has conducted drug discovery partnerships with Bristol-Myers Squibb, Sanofi, Bayer and Dainippon Sumitomo as well as several biotech companies. 

"Exscientia is breaking ground in small molecule drug design, with a platform that radically improves drug discovery" says William Abecassis, Head of BlackRock's Innovation Capital who will join Exscientia's Board of Directors as an observer. "We are thrilled to be investing in this world-class team, who are already delivering results with AI-designed drugs now entering clinical trials."

Andrew Hopkins, CEO of Exscientia added, "We are delighted that BlackRock shares our vision for revolutionising how drugs are discovered. It is also recognition of the ingenuity and hard work of our employees to turn the promise of AI into reality today, where we are bringing the world's first AI designed drugs into the clinic. BlackRock's investment is an important step in our vision that all drugs

will be designed by AI. I believe that our company's reimagined approach to drug discovery will become the new de facto standard"

Exscientia has doubled in size over the past year and expects to double again in 2021, including a recent US expansion into Miami and Boston.  The company employs over 100 people from over 20 different nations, with equal balance of technologists and drug discovery scientists, of which 60% are PhDs.  Exscientia was named the fastest growing private biotech or pharmaceutical company in the UK in the 2021 Alantra Pharma Fast 50.

Exscientia statement ends

ENQUIRIES

ABoUT EXscientia

Exscientia is an Artificial Intelligence (AI)-driven pharmatech committed to discovering and designing the best possible medicines in the fastest and most effective manner. Exscientia is the first company to progress AI-designed small molecules into the clinical setting and repeatedly demonstrate the ability of AI to transform the how drugs are created.

Drug design is precision engineering at the molecular scale. Exscientia has built dedicated AI systems that efficiently learn from the widest range of data and consistently reapply enhanced knowledge through iterations of design. Because Exscientia's AI platform learns more effectively and rapidly than human-led efforts alone, candidate molecules satisfying complex therapeutic requirements are created with revolutionary efficiency.  Exscientia believes that designing better drugs, faster, will allow the best ideas of science to rapidly become the best medicines for patients.

For more information visit us on www.exscientia.ai or follow us on Twitter @exscientiaAI

ABOUT FRONTIER IP

Frontier IP unites science and commerce by identifying strong intellectual property and accelerating its development through a range of commercialisation services. A critical part of the Group's work is involving relevant industry partners at an early stage of development to ensure technology meets real world demands and needs.

The Group looks to build and grow a portfolio of equity stakes and licence income by taking an active involvement in spin-out companies, including support for fund raising and collaboration with relevant industry partners at an early stage of development.