When Recursion launched in 2013, the fledgling biotech’s goal was
to turn machine vision loose on images of cells, at scale, to better understand the biology of disease. Exscientia, founded the year before, set out by contrast to code algorithms that would enable medicinal chemists to
better explore chemical space. Over the past decade, both firms have leaned into expectations that these and related computational approaches will make drug discovery better, faster and cheaper. The two companies now want to become one, betting that an AI-first, ‘full-stack’ small-molecule discovery engine can deliver the drug discovery goods.
