Arpeggio Biosciences, a Boulder-based biotech company, raised $17 million in Series A financing to bolster its technology that provides a mechanistic understanding of how drugs work.
San Francisco-based Builders VC led the funding round. Also participating were Tencent, ATEM Capital, Formic Ventures, Tau Ventures, BoxOne Ventures and Longtail Capital. Investors who participated in Arpeggio's $3.2 million seed round in 2020 also joined the Series A. Those firms include Khosla Ventures, TechU Ventures, FundersClub, Alice Zhang and Fifty Years.
“Health care is primed to benefit from a disrupting system like Arpeggio’s, which has so much potential to help further our understanding of how drugs interact with each individual taking them,” Amit Mehta, general partner of Builders VC, said in a statement. “We believe Arpeggio has the vision to transform the way we approach drug and therapy development.”
Arpeggio was founded in 2018 by Joey Azofeifa, Tim Read and Laura Norris. The trio built a database of RNA sequences, which provides snapshots about how different drugs affect cellular dynamics. The snapshots are analyzed to determine how drugs function and to guide the development of better therapeutics.
The technology is driven by proprietary machine-learning algorithms developed by Azofeifa, according to the Colorado Bioscience Association. Azofeifa's work earned him a spot on the Forbes 30 Under 30 list in the health care category in 2020.
Arpeggio's system monitors the activity of more than 100,000 mRNA transcripts from diseased and healthy cells after they've been exposed to small molecules, biologics or antisense oligonucleotides, the company said. It uses machine learning to reconstruct the biological networks affected by the molecule and match the molecule to diseases where the compound could be therapeutically relevant.
Arpeggio is developing its own pipeline of drugs, and it partners with pharmaceutical companies to uncover new insights into their therapeutics. The company has contracted with more than 40 pharmaceutical companies so far.
Azofiefa said the $17 million investment would allow the company to develop therapeutics that could target a cell's entire transcriptome, which refers to the full range of mRNA molecules expressed from the genes of an organism. Its technology has the potential to accelerate drug research and the discovery of future life-saving therapies, the company said.
"This Series A funding will enable us to continue our mission of discovering new therapies for diseases arising through dysregulation of transcription,” Azofeifa said in a statement. "By building technology capable of screening hundreds of thousands of compounds, we feel well-positioned to discover novel modulators of high-value targets considered ‘undruggable.'"
