5Y News | Helixon Pharma Closes Nearly 500 Million Yuan Series A to Deepen AI-Powered Drug Discovery

五源资本·June 24, 2022

Building a life-science platform powered by artificial intelligence.

Helixon recently announced the completion of a nearly RMB 500 million Series A funding round. The round was led by 5Y Capital, with participation from Gaorong Capital, Neumann Capital, and three angel-round investors — Xiang He Capital, Hillhouse, and Tsingzhi Capital. Helixon will continue to deepen its focus on AI-powered new drug development, expand its team and business development efforts, enhance its AI high-performance computing capabilities, broaden its high-throughput experimental platform, and simultaneously advance both its proprietary pipeline and external partnerships.

A partner at 5Y Capital stated: "Dr. Peng Jian is an entrepreneur with a sense of mission whom we greatly admire. He has gathered and led a group of top talent from China and abroad in science, algorithms, and engineering, attempting to build an AI-based life sciences platform. 5Y is delighted to lead this round of financing, and we wish Dr. Peng Jian and Helixon even greater achievements in the future."

Peng Jian

Founder, Helixon

You raised funding against the headwinds of the pandemic. What's behind the company's rapid growth? What breakthroughs have you achieved this past year?

Peng Jian: For a startup that's just turned one year old, I think the most important thing is the team. We've invested enormous energy in building and developing our team, and we've been fortunate to bring together a group of passionate, capable people with shared dreams to work toward this goal together. Although our country has yet to develop a systematic approach to interdisciplinary talent cultivation and scientific research, we've always believed that this generation of young people, given sufficient support, can produce world-class work. And the facts have borne this out. Recently, Helixon released OmegaFold for protein structure prediction — not only matching or exceeding existing algorithms in prediction accuracy, but more importantly achieving a conceptual breakthrough: predicting 3D structure from a single protein sequence alone. Building on this breakthrough, we've also made progress on the business front, and are now collaborating with multiple research institutions, biotech companies, and pharmaceutical firms on pipeline partnerships and development.

What do you envision for the future of this field? What role will Helixon play in it?

Peng Jian: In recent years, artificial intelligence — including machine learning and deep learning — has achieved tremendous success across various applications, far exceeding people's expectations. In life sciences, including new drug development, AI-driven drug development is poised to become a revolutionary force in the pharmaceutical field. Perhaps within the next 5-10 years, more than half of all new drug development will involve AI. More critically, the integration of AI with advances in biotechnology promises to fundamentally transform the traditional trial-and-error design process. Over the past year, we've already seen how Helixon's self-developed AI technology and high-throughput biotechnology can significantly enhance the discovery process for large-molecule biologics, and we hope to continue contributing our share to this era of transformation.

Why did you choose 5Y Capital's investment?

Peng Jian: We've actually maintained close contact with 5Y since early last year. Throughout this process, the brainstorming sessions with Fisher, Steven, and other friends at 5Y, as well as our joint analysis of technology and markets, greatly helped us more precisely define Helixon's business model and strategic direction. 5Y's investment philosophy, their understanding of the AIDD direction, and their commitment to innovative technology left a deep impression on us. Crazy ideas need to be tried and tested, and we're honored to have 5Y's support.

Shi Yunfeng

Investor, 5Y Capital

Why did you invest in Helixon?

Shi Yunfeng: The convergence of AI and life sciences is showing clear signs of acceleration, particularly with the increase in data volume and revolutionary algorithmic breakthroughs represented by AlphaFold. The Helixon team has proposed a new paradigm shift in drug development, building an end-to-end, big-data closed-loop large-molecule drug discovery platform centered on AI, with the potential to become the most influential AI killer application.

What about Helixon's founder and team resonated with you?

Shi Yunfeng: Professor Peng is an entrepreneur I can't stop thinking about. He is not only a top-tier interdisciplinary scientist, but has also demonstrated the qualities of a first-rate entrepreneur in team building, goal-setting, and entrepreneurial resolve. Helixon has assembled a world-class team across biology, computing, and machine learning. Helixon's talent philosophy also impressed me — the belief that if you give the smartest, hardest-working young people opportunities and good guidance, they can produce the most outstanding results.

What do you envision for the future of this field? What future are you most excited to see?

Shi Yunfeng: I'm very optimistic about AI applications in scientific research, but this requires deep integration of the Keplerian and Newtonian paradigms, massive amounts of data, and abundant computing power. Keplerian progress comes from experiments, while AlphaFold2 represents the first methodological advance in a long time. But this is only an early milestone for AI in science. We need to use new AI tools to climb the tech tree step by step, and in principle, given the current pace of evolution in AI algorithms and computing power, supplemented with sufficient data, these are all achievable.

At the protein prediction level, there are layers of challenges that AI can attempt to address: from predicting static individual protein structures, to predicting protein-protein interactions, using AI to guide protein design, and perhaps even wilder visions — rebuilding an immune system for each person outside their body based on AI.

At the broader biological level, can we use the progress AI brings to the Keplerian paradigm to further explore and understand pathways? Can we go end-to-end from structure to function prediction?

AI is the ultimate tool for human exploration of problems. In AI and life sciences — two domains with massive technological variables — do we have the opportunity to tackle grand challenges that were previously impossible?

Helixon is dedicated to building the next-generation AI scientific computing platform, combined with proprietary high-throughput biological experimental technology, to provide drug researchers with intelligent systems for molecular computation, simulation, and design at the microscopic level. In the field of new drug development, particularly large-molecule drug discovery, Helixon is innovatively developing efficient machine learning algorithms and data acquisition technologies to restructure the drug development process, thereby greatly improving the speed and efficiency of new drug R&D.

Since its founding in June 2021, Helixon has consistently stood at the forefront of industry and scientific research. The company has already developed multiple revolutionary innovative algorithms for protein drug design and modeling, integrating them with a high-throughput experimental platform to complete a high-efficiency iterative loop of AI design and experimental validation. As its platform technology gradually matures, Helixon has begun laying out multiple large-molecule and immunotherapy R&D pipelines, and looks forward to rapidly advancing them to the clinical stage. Since last year, Helixon has attracted top experts and young scientists from China and abroad in AI research, structural biology, and disease research. World-leading technical capabilities, a strong R&D team, and a clear business model positioning have earned Helixon broad recognition from capital markets, enabling this funding round to be completed efficiently.

Helixon founder Dr. Peng Jian stated: "We thank 5Y Capital, Gaorong Capital, Neumann Capital, and our existing shareholders for their full support of Helixon. This financing once again demonstrates the market's high recognition of Helixon's technology and business development. We will move forward resolutely and swiftly, increasing R&D investment, fully advancing partnerships and pipeline development, and using artificial intelligence to protect human health."

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