Biocomputing Platform BioMap Founded by Baidu CEO Secures Hundreds of Millions of Dollars in Series A Financing Round
On Friday, biocomputing platform BioMap completed an A Round of financing worth hundreds of millions of dollars, led by GGV Capital and followed by Baidu, Legend Capital, BlueRun Ventures, Verity Ventures and Xianghe Capital. BioMap co-founder and Baidu Chairman Robin Li will continue to ramp up investment.
This round of financing will be mainly used for technology R&D and talent recruitment.
BioMap, an innovative drug R&D platform driven by bio-computing technology, was founded in November 2020 by Robin Li, CEO of Chinese internet giant Baidu and now Chairman of BioMap. Liu Wei, CEO of Baidu Ventures, also serves as CEO of the company.
Specifically, BioMap utilizes multi-comics biological data, high-throughput validation experiments and drug development experience by means of advanced computing and biotechnology to map out disease targets and drug design. The technology is used to improve drug R&D efficiency for itself and its partners, and ultimately intends to realize the development of global first-in-class original drugs.
In the future, BioMap will mainly focus on immune mechanism research of tumors, autoimmune diseases and fibrotic diseases.
By the end of July, nearly 100 clinical and research teams including Chinese Academy of Sciences, Peking Union Medical College Hospital, Peking University, Tsinghua and Fudan University have applied for the research plans.
The BioMap team reckons that AI technology needs to be practically applied to all aspects of drug discovery. To this end, the company is also building its own laboratory, so as to systematically improve the operational efficiency of the whole process.
After this round of financing, BioMap will further improve its bio-computing engine, continue to recruit more talent and bolster its drug R&D pipeline to reach a new stage of operations.
In the field of life sciences, Google’s DeepMind launched Alphafold to enter the biological computing market three years ago.
