Enveda raises $311M to push nature-derived AI drugs into clinical trials

Enveda, a biotech startup that uses artificial intelligence to hunt for new drugs in the natural world, has raised a $311 million Series E at a $2 billion valuation. The round was led by Catalio Capital Management, with Iconiq and other investors taking part. The new valuation is double what the company reached 12 months earlier.

Medicines found in nature, not only built in the lab

Enveda's premise is that powerful medicines already exist in plants and microbes, and can be discovered rather than synthesized from scratch. The company was founded in 2019 by Viswa Colluru, an early employee of Recursion Pharmaceuticals. It studies the knowledge accumulated around the world about how different cultures used plants against pain and disease, then applies machine learning to pick the ones most likely to become treatments.

The approach has already produced a large map of the field: by 2024, its database linked 38,000 medicinal plants to about 12,000 diseases and symptoms. Colluru told TechCrunch that geographically separated cultures were far more likely to use similar plants for similar conditions even though they never communicated — a pattern the company treats as a signal in its search.

Candidates already in human trials

Enveda is currently testing several drugs in patients. One targets severe skin conditions, while another is designed to help people maintain weight loss after they stop taking GLP-1 medications — the class of drugs, including semaglutide, that has become a global standard for treating obesity and diabetes.

No AI-discovered drug has yet won FDA approval, which is why the step into clinical testing is the one investors watch most closely. Enveda is part of the wave of companies pushing machine-found molecules into that stage.

Why the round matters

The Series E dwarfs the $55 million Enveda raised in 2024, when investors in that round included Microsoft and The Nature Conservancy, and its total funding stood at $230 million. Doubling the valuation in a year shows that venture money is still flowing into long, expensive drug development — as long as a company can point to candidates already in clinical trials.