Montreal’s Valence Discovery, a spinoff of artificial intelligence skunkworks Mila, is going for US$47.5 million and Toronto’s Cyclica for US$40 million, both primarily in Recursion stock. All three companies work in facets of drug discovery assisted by machine learning. (The Logic)

Talking point: Recursion has several medicines in clinical trials, none on the market yet. Cyclica raised US$23 million just under three years ago; its Toronto staff will be integrated into Recursion’s existing operation there. Valence will become a Recursion research centre led by Valence CEO Daniel Cohen “with continued advisory” from Mila’s star AI thinker Yoshua Bengio. Recursion’s announcement said adding Cyclica’s AI-aided technology for designing new molecules and Valence’s capabilities in extracting meaningful findings from noisy and sparse data for molecule design to its own capacity for wet-lab experiments and analysis will create “the most complete, technology-enabled drug discovery solution in the biopharma industry.” Recursion raised US$501.8 million in a 2021 IPO but its share price has fallen more than 80 per cent since.