Enveda secures $311M to bring more nature-derived AI drugs into clinical trials

Enveda just landed a huge check: $311 million in Series E funding, with a $2 billion valuation attached. Catalio Capital Management led the round, and Iconiq was among the backers. The new price tag is twice what the company was valued at 12 months ago.

The company’s pitch is simple, and a little seductive. Instead of building medicines entirely from scratch in a lab, it wants to pull useful compounds from the natural world — from plants and microbes — and use AI to speed up the search. Viswa Colluru, who was an early employee at Recursion Pharmaceuticals, founded Enveda in 2019 to make that process move faster.

That idea is no longer stuck in the slide deck stage. Enveda is already testing several drugs in patients, including one for severe skin conditions and another meant to help people keep weight off after stopping GLP-1s. That puts it in a growing group of AI drugmakers trying to get beyond discovery and into actual trials, which is still the real test.

The broader backdrop matters here too. AI has not yet produced an FDA-approved drug. So for now, the story is not about a finished medicine. It’s about a company betting that nature has a deeper drug cabinet than conventional pharma has managed to search, and that AI can open the drawers faster.