Formic Ventures invests in Arctoris

By Michael Antonov November 19, 2020

We are excited to be making an investment in Arctoris, a robotic-powered lab that offers biotechnology firms an opportunity to get to higher quality results and do so quicker and potentially at lower cost.

Biotechs often spend significant time and capital to build out their own labs, with experiments conducted by hand -- an error prone and time consuming process, often giving results which are not trivial to repeat. Alternatively, they delegate work to CROs, saving investment and some effort yet at a cost of lost visibility and iteration speed, with results still subject to human error.

We see a future where major parts of scientific research and drug discovery are increasingly automatable, reproducible, transparent and accessible to innovators. Robotic labs allow scientists to focus on creative tasks and analysis, letting machines do the repetitive tasks with impeccable precision. Arctoris is a key player bringing this vision to life, as their fully automated R&D platform takes experiment quality and speed to a new level. Their unique approach to drug discovery is already being used by biotech and pharma companies on three continents.

The transformative benefits that Arctoris brings to data generation are illustrated by a recent partnership with Insilico Medicine, which combines Insilico’s unique strengths in AI-guided target identification and generative chemistry with the speed and accuracy of the Arctoris platform for high-quality cell-based, molecular and biochemical assays. This partnership amplified Insilico Medicine’s ability to discover and validate novel molecules, leading to new inhibitors for COVID-19 in a fraction of the time usually required.

We are excited to help Arctoris with their growth and scaling, as well as new research capabilities they are bringing to the world.

Learn more