CEO Series | Enveda: Building a 21st century generational pharma company.

What if the best AI drug discovery company was just the best drug discovery company?

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In this episode of CEO Series, we sit down with Viswa Colluru, Founder and CEO of Enveda, to unpack why the future of drug discovery may look less like engineering a target and more like reading the chemistry nature has spent billions of years refining.

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For decades, the industry has worked target-first: nominate a protein, then spend enormous effort to inhibit or degrade it. But many of medicine's most important breakthroughs ran the other way. We made aspirin, and it taught us about inflammation. We understood how morphine worked, and it taught us about pain. Enveda is rebuilding discovery around that insight, pairing AI with the full complexity of living systems to find first-in-class medicines, and compressing the path from molecule to candidate into a 24-hour cycle that spans Boulder, Colorado and Hyderabad, India.

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In this conversation, we cover:

• Why "molecules that make markets" is the bar for everything that enters the pipeline
• Why pouring AI over the existing paradigm won't move drug discovery's 90% failure rate
• How first-in-class mechanisms create a portfolio that is hard to copy, what Viswa calls "China-proof"
• What it takes to reach a candidate molecule in roughly 100 analogs, against an industry norm of 600 to 1,500
• The three-stage path to building a generational pharma company

Viswa also shares a candid perspective on why evolution's chemistry holds scaling laws that dwarf today's AI models, what it takes to build beyond the single-drug exit, and why patient, long-horizon capital changes how a pharma company gets built. Enveda recently raised a $150M Series D, led by Premji Invest, to advance its pipeline of first-in-class medicines into the clinic.

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Enveda is a clinical-stage biotechnology company using AI to translate nature's chemistry into new medicines, discovering first-in-class drugs from molecules science has never explored.

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Premji Invest is a $16B+ evergreen crossover fund partnering with founders from inception to IPO and beyond.