AI Drug Discovery Pulls in Fresh Capital as GV Backs Singapore’s Engine

Alphabet’s venture capital arm, GV, has invested $5 Mn in Engine Biosciences, a Singapore-based biotechnology company utilising artificial intelligence for oncology drug discovery. The funding, first reported by DealStreetAsia based on local regulatory filings, highlights a broader resurgence of investor appetite for AI-driven precision medicine.

The funding follows a capital injection from Pfizer Ventures, the pharmaceutical giant’s investment unit, marking its first startup investment in Southeast Asia and making it Engine’s second-largest shareholder, according to DealStreetAsia. Earlier this year, Engine also secured $13.6 Mn from its current investor network, which includes Polaris Partners, ClavystBio, SEEDS Capital, and Coronet Ventures.

Engine is one Southeast Asian beneficiary of the current investment shift. The company operates between Singapore and Silicon Valley and uses machine learning alongside high-throughput experimental biology to identify genetic interactions that can reveal cancer drug targets and biomarkers. Rather than relying on computation alone, its approach is designed to test those predictions experimentally before moving promising targets towards drug development.

That distinction matters as investors become more demanding about what AI can actually deliver in medicine. Engine’s NetMAPPR platform maps biological networks and identifies disease-driving genetic relationships, while its experimental systems are intended to validate which of those relationships could become drug targets or help identify patients most likely to respond to treatment. The company said in 2023 that it had uncovered more than 30 previously unidentified precision medicine opportunities with validation data.

The startup is now trying to move some of that work beyond target discovery. In April 2025, Engine partnered with Singapore’s Experimental Drug Development Centre (EDDC), the national drug discovery and development platform hosted by A*STAR, to develop precision cancer therapies.

The first programme under that collaboration focusses on ENB-871, a pairing of a drug target and patient-selection biomarkers discovered using NetMAPPR. Engine and EDDC are developing small-molecule degraders against the target and working towards demonstrating their effectiveness in animal models, with potential applications in genetically defined subsets of breast, liver, kidney and prostate cancers.

Engine has been building towards that point for several years. A $27 Mn Series A extension led by Polaris Partners in 2023 took its Series A financing to $70 Mn and its total disclosed funding at that time to $86 Mn. The round was intended to help translate programmes generated by its machine-learning and combinatorial-genetics platforms towards clinical use.

The cheques are landing as money moves back towards a part of biotechnology that spent years promising that machine learning could shorten the long, expensive process of finding new drugs. Venture investment in AI-driven drug discovery reached about $2.2 Bn in 2025, up from $599 Mn in 2023, according to Financial Times data.

The size of some recent bets shows how far that conviction has travelled. Isomorphic Labs, the drug-discovery company spun out of Google DeepMind, raised $2.1 Bn in May in a round led by Thrive Capital and joined by GV, Alphabet, CapitalG, Temasek, MGX and the UK Sovereign AI Fund. The company, which is using AI to design drugs, expects its first clinical trials by the end of 2026.

Capital is also building up at the fund level. Dimension Capital raised an $800 Mn third fund in July to invest at the intersection of science and computing, while Andreessen Horowitz allocated $700 Mn to Bio + Health as part of more than $15 Bn in new funds announced this year. A16z said its wider strategy includes applying AI to areas such as biology and health.

GV’s arrival is, therefore, not its first bet on the intersection of computing and biology. The firm, which manages more than $13 Bn across technology and life sciences investments, says it has partnered with 20 AI healthcare companies, including insitro and Isomorphic Labs, whose work includes using AI to accelerate drug discovery.

For Engine, however, the growing list of investors does not remove the central risk confronting the sector. Machine learning can help narrow the search for promising targets and molecules, but the harder test remains whether those discoveries survive preclinical development and human trials.

The latest funding puts more capital behind Engine as it tries to cross that divide and places the Singapore biotech inside a much larger investor bet that AI can eventually change the economics of making medicines.