Generate:Biomedicines, a Flagship Pioneering company using artificial intelligence to create new medicines, announced today that it has struck a deal with Novartis to develop an undisclosed number of targets in various disease areas. With milestone payments, the company is eligible to receive over $1 billion, in addition to royalties.
Novartis is paying Generate $65 million up front, which includes $15 million for an undisclosed amount of equity in the company. Previously, NVIDIA and Amgen had both invested in the company’s 2023 $273 million series C, which brought the company’s total fundraise to around $700 million.
“We believe that there is potential to identify novel, differentiated candidates and to have an overall reduction in the time needed for preclinical development,” wrote John Blankenship, Novartis Biomedical Research’s executive director of biologics discovery, in an emailed statement, calling Generate’s AI and wet lab capabilities “mature” and its proof-of-concept “effectively demonstrated.”
