Better, Faster Drug Discovery Finds $43M For Kalypsys

Biotech continues to capture the hearts and wallets of venture capitalists in a big way.

Kalypsys landed one of the largest first-round financings ever in the sector last week, taking in $43 million from the Sprout Group, the Novartis BioVenture Fund, and others. The San Diego startup, which is automating aspects of drug discovery to help it develop drugs, was spun out of the Genomics Institute of the Novartis Research Foundation last year.

Kalypsys will be able to screen up to 1 million chemical compounds daily, five to 10 times more than industry competitors, and gain information about them earlier in the drug-discovery process. This, says chief business officer Pratik Shah, could "allow for higher-quality compounds that could potentially have higher success rates associated with them."