Company Spotlight – Recursion
For this month’s company spotlight we are delighted to feature Recursion, an American life sciences company whom we have recently helped with landing in London and setting up partnerships.
About Recursion
Founded in 2013 in Salt Lake City, Utah, Recursion is a clinical-stage company leading the intersection of Tech and Bio (TechBio) by decoding biology to industrialize drug discovery. Since the beginning, Recursion’s vision has been to leverage technology in order to discover and develop better medicines faster.
Success of Recursion
Since being founded, Recursion has grown to >500 employees with a near-equal mix of life scientists and technologists across sites in Salt Lake City, Toronto, Montreal, the San Francisco Bay Area, and now London. In that time, they have generated and amassed one of the largest biological and chemical datasets in the world, with more than 50 petabytes of proprietary data, a number that is growing every day. This has aided the development of an expansive pipeline of potential medicines in rare diseases and precision oncology currently in or nearing clinical trials, several of which are on track to read out Phase 2 data over the next 12 months. Recursion have secured some of the largest discovery collaborations in the industry with leading biopharma companies to pursue complex areas of biology, such as neuroscience with Roche/Genentech and precision oncology with Bayer. They have also secured technology partnerships with companies like NVIDIA and Tempus, focused on accelerating the development of more powerful AI models.
Focus on talent
Recursion’s rapid growth as a leader in the TechBio industry has turned the company’s attention towards talent, which largely influenced the company’s recent decision to establish a European base in London. London stood out as an ideal location given its brilliant and interdisciplinary talent across the fields of technology, biology and chemistry. Our Head of Cluster Development Ivana Poparic attended the recent opening of Recursion’s London office, which will provide both Recursion and Valence Labs, the company’s AI research engine, with access to this world-class talent.
With a London base now established, the company are excited to hire many new “Recursionauts” who will help advance Recursion’s mission of decoding biology to radically improve lives. In fact, multiple new roles have already opened across technology and biology functions with immediate plans to hire the first 20 people to be based out of the new London office. Career openings can be found at recursion.com/careers.
The future
Going forwards, Recursion hope to continue pioneering advances in medicine at the intersection of technology and biology, building on London’s reputation as a hub for cutting-edge research and innovation. They are also eager to harness the power of London’s TechBio ecosystem to collaborate with leaders in the space, across both technology and biopharma industries as well as academic institutions. In a big recent development, Recursion announced the addition of Michael Bronstein, DeepMind Professor of Artificial Intelligence at Oxford University and world leader in geometric deep learning, graph neural networks, and protein design, as a new Scientific Advisor. Professor Bronstein will support Recursion and Valence Labs in the development of state-of-the-art AI models to support the industrialization of drug discovery.
Chris Gibson, the Co-Founder and CEO of Recursion, expressed his delight at the company’s new expansion into the London ecosystem, commenting “As Recursion continues to lead and define the growing TechBio industry, it’s critical we hire the best possible talent, much of which is located in Europe. We’re excited to continue growing in London and tap into the region’s extraordinary talent pool.”
We look forward to following Recursion’s exciting journey in the coming years!