Recursion buys Canadian firms Cyclica and Valence

Recursion Pharmaceuticals, a Salt Lake City-based clinical stage drug discovery company, has signed agreements to acquire two companies in the AI-enabled drug discovery space. The acquisitions are Cyclica of Toronto and Valence, based in Montreal.

“Recursion has pioneered the massive, parallel generation of -omics data with machine learning in order to map and navigate biology to discover new medicines faster. The strategic acquisitions of Cyclica and Valence add industry-leading capabilities in digital chemistry, as well as machine-learning and artificial intelligence, which combined with our large-scale automated wet-laboratories and supercomputing capabilities, enables us to deploy what I believe is the most complete, technology-enabled drug discovery solution in the biopharma industry,” said Chris Gibson, co-founder and CEO of Recursion. “I am so excited to welcome the Cyclica and Valence teams to Recursion, especially at such a dynamic moment in history when ML and AI are creating so much rapid change across every industry.”

“Cyclica and Recursion both believe in the value of industrializing drug discovery,” said Naheed Kurji, CEO and co-founder of Cyclica. “Combining our proteome-wide prediction of small molecule-target interactions into Recursion’s data universe will create one of the largest fit-for-purpose biological and chemical datasets in the drug discovery space. Together, I believe Recursion will have an immense impact on human health in the years to come.”

Joining forces with Recursion’s Montreal deep learning research office, Valence will become an artificial intelligence and machine learning research center to be led by Cohen with continued advice from Yoshua Bengio, scientific advisor to both Recursion and Valence.

Recursion’s acquisition agree-ments set the Cyclica purchase price at $40 million and the Valence purchase price at $47.5 million. The purchase price in the acquisitions will be payable in the form of shares of Recursion Class A common stock, shares of a subsidiary of Recursion exchangeable for shares of Recursion’s Class A common stock and the assumption of certain outstanding Valence and Cyclica options. Recursion expects both acquisitions to be completed in the second quarter of 2023, subject to applicable closing conditions.