Octant Launches Polypharmacology Drug Discovery Engine for Complex Diseases with $30 Million Series A Financing Led by Andreessen Horowitz

Octant, Inc., a synthetic biology drug discovery company designing small molecule, multi-target drug leads for multifactorial diseases announced that it has raised $30 million in a Series A financing led by venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz. Octant is using the proceeds to further develop its discovery platform, which targets large numbers of G-protein coupled receptors (GPCRs) and their downstream signaling pathways to engineer drugs to treat complex diseases. Additionally, Octant is responding to the global call for collaboration by open-sourcing part of its platform under the Open COVID Pledge for use in the COVID-19 pandemic. The company has shared these technological repurposing efforts for viral detection and a new protocol called SwabSeq here.