The Story of Recursion

Our mission

Our mission is to Decode Biology to Radically Improve Lives. Through technologies like automation, new biological tools, and artificial intelligence, we believe we can generate intelligent maps of biology and navigate those maps to more effective medicines.



Historically, it has taken over ten years and an average capitalized R&D cost of approximately $2 billion per approved medicine to move a drug discovery project from early discovery to an approved therapeutic. This failure rate disappoints patients who are waiting for therapy and incurs huge costs that drive up drug prices.

Recursion Decoded

Recursion Decoded tells the story of a new kind of pharma company. One that values big swings over cautious steps. One where the “Bilingual” workforce of “Recursionauts” is made up of a nearly equal balance of technologists and life scientists. And one where we won’t be satisfied with incremental improvements to the status quo. Read about how we are building the biopharma company of the future.

Read our definitive guide to being a Recursionaut

Our growing map of human cellular biology allows us to probe the complexity of disease and discover potential medicines by approaching drug discovery in a new way. This is the challenge we care so deeply about solving: finding better medicines and making them more accessible to the people who need them.

We aim to radically improve the lives of patients and those who love them. As we decode biology together, our collective efforts have the potential to bring about transformational change within biopharmaceutical industry norms - all while making lives profoundly better for patients around the world.

Our mindset

Our culture at Recursion is designed with intention to fuel our mission. We believe culture drives delivery. Essential to decoding biology in our context, is a mindset deeply committed to achieving impact at unprecedented scale through pioneering new industrialized approaches. We call it the Recursion Mindset.

The guideposts for teaching our people to successfully transition to TechBio and deliver our mission are our Founding Principles and Values.

Learn more

Timeline

2013

November 5, 2013

Recursion is founded

2015

October 5, 2015

Lead clinical program REC-994 receives FDA Orphan Drug designation

2016

September 2, 2016

Close Series A financing with lead investor Lux Capital

2017

September 25, 2017

Close Series B financing with lead investor DCVC

2018
2019

February 12, 2019

Close the Series C financing with new, lead investor Baillie Gifford

2020

April 24, 2020

Release second open-source data; launch RxRX19 & RxRx2 on SARS-CoV-2 virus

2021
2022
2023
2024

Timeline

2019

May 6, 2019

Release first open-source data; launch RxRX1 machine learning competition on Kaggle

February 12, 2019

Close the Series C financing with new, lead investor Baillie Gifford

January 4, 2019

Identify and in-license second clinical-stage asset, REC-2282, for neurofibromatosis type 2

2017

September 25, 2017

Close Series B financing with lead investor DCVC

2016

September 2, 2016

Close Series A financing with lead investor Lux Capital

2015

October 5, 2015

Lead clinical program REC-994 receives FDA Orphan Drug designation

2013

November 5, 2013

Recursion is founded