Recursion Pharmaceuticals merges artificial intelligence with automated wet-lab biology to discover new drugs at a pace traditional pharma can’t match. The company has built one of the world’s largest proprietary biological datasets by running millions of automated experiments and capturing high-resolution cellular imaging data.
Their approach works like this: robotic systems perform biological experiments at scale, generating massive amounts of cellular imaging data. Custom AI models then analyze these images to identify how diseases affect cells and which chemical compounds might reverse those effects. This closed-loop system — where experiments inform AI models that guide the next round of experiments — creates a compounding data advantage over time.
Recursion went public on NASDAQ in 2021 and has built a pipeline spanning oncology, rare diseases, and infectious diseases. They’ve generated over 19 petabytes of proprietary biological data, which feeds their AI platform called Recursion OS. The company also acquired Cyclica and Valence Discovery to strengthen their computational chemistry capabilities.
Partnerships with major pharmaceutical companies including Roche-Genentech and Bayer validate Recursion’s platform. The Roche deal alone was worth up to $12 billion in potential milestones. What makes Recursion stand out isn’t just their AI models — it’s the tight integration between computational predictions and physical experiments that lets them test hypotheses in days rather than months.
