Atomwise Series-B

This is the Atomwise pitch deck to raise a $123m series-b round in 2020.

About

Atomwise develops artificial intelligence systems using powerful deep-learning algorithms and supercomputers for drug discovery.

In a sign of how hot the market is, Atomwise announced on Tuesday that it closed a $123 million Series B funding round. That brings its total funding to date to $175 million. The round was led by B Capital Group and Sanabil Investments and also included Tencent, Y Combinator, Dolby Ventures, and AME Cloud Venture.

Atomwise uses AI to help drug industry giants like Eli Lilly and Bayer uncover innovative medicines. But unlike some rivals that are trying to find ways to repurpose existing treatments, the firm is focused exclusively on new medications.

It now has over 750 initiatives in place with pharmaceutical manufacturers and academic institutions, according to CEO and co-founder Abraham Heifets.

“We’re able to go after disease targets that no one else can go after,” Heifets told Business Insider.

Drug companies are working to develop their own in-house technology similar to what Atomwise offers, but Heifets argued that those operations could take years to scale and run into unique problems — particularly the need to work across sectors within the organizations that were typically siloed from one another.

“Especially for a big pharma company, what they’re faced with is a cultural shift,” he added. “The real advantage for us is that we’ve been building trust in the marketplace.”

While AI was in use prior to the pandemic, the healthcare industry is tapping the technology to try to quickly discover a treatment or vaccine for the coronavirus. Atomwise, for example, has 15 projects ongoing related to the COVID-19 outbreak.

“If you want to compress time, the ability to work on multiple hypotheses in parallel is very important,” said Heifets.

The latest funding round will be used to, among other things, improve its AI technology and grow its partner base. On top of joint venturing with other firms, Atomwise also wants to begin developing its own pipeline of potential treatments.

Funding Rounds

Pitch Deck Review Summary

Structured Summary Review

Words

Sometimes too many words, others not enough.

Slide length

There are 14 slides. I don’t think it is the full deck though.

Headers

I don’t like their headers, but they are better than most decks.

Appearance

They definitely got a designer to mess things up. With science decks, I am actually ok with nerdyness. Design doesn’t matter much is the team is solid.

Narrative

The deck is hard to follow and engage with.

Structure

It is designed by a designer. The deck looks good, but I think the design likely dictated content to an extent and this has messed their deck up a bit.

Slides

There are key slides missing, most notably the team slide. My feeling is this might be a redacted deck.

Slide by Slide Review

The cover is fine.

The first slide I want to see in a deck is what I call the One Liner. In it you just explain what it is you do so that investors know.

Keep headers in the header. Headers are important, like really important.

So this is a summary or exec summary slide. Points are scientist nerdy, but ok. I don’t really like these slides as they are rarely done well.

It would seem that they are going for a light touch deck approach.

They raised $123m, so the $5.5b deals signed aren’t ridiculous, there just aren’t details on those so I don’t know what the story is.

Lolz, you know when people are actually applying AI methods when they use terms like CNN. Whenever a founder writes that they do “AI” and don’t mention a term like hyperparameter, it is so obvious they are full of BS.

I don’t have a PhD, and statistically neither do you, but here they are explaining nerdy science stuff in 3 steps.

If they can do that, you and your fashion brand can do it too… FML.

They need to not do the right-hand header thing. This is a science deck and they need space to explain science stuff.

This looks like a decent slide.

My thing is that there is no narrative in the deck. I like learning new stuff, especially about biotech. If they wrote the deck more like a story, I would want to read it. But there isn’t one, it’s a collection of slides.

I don’t know what success means, but they seem good at it.

As academic partnership slides go, this isn’t a terrible one. Do you feel compelled to read it though?

I don’t know what the point of this slide is.

This looks like a pointless slide in some marketing presentation written by a marketing person who doesn’t really know what they do.

Note the big image and the text which probably explains the point, but is too small to be read.

Focus on making one point per slide and make it easy for investors to know what the point is.

Consultants would generally agree pie charts have no place in a good PPT.

I get good vibes from this deck, it’s just not terribly fun to read.

Nerd alert. It probably means something to a scientist, and if so lean into the nerd. Why do they need some red COVID-looking image on the slide?

I hate quotes in decks. They are lazy.

I don’t know if the founders are trying to be less nerdy and to jazz things up. If you are a huge nerd and doing nerdy stuff, just write nerd stuff and target nerd investors who love you. Find your tribe.

Look at the ArangoDB deck. They are clearly nerds and are writing to nerd investors who paid attention in a relational database class (note I did get a first in strategic info systems, lol, like that means something).

So what. The slide looks sort of fancy for science people, but too much to read. I have written 24 pitch deck reviews today so am hitting the Tito’s now before my flight so I clearly don’t have that much interest in spending forever reading slides. Don’t assume investors will have a sustained interest in reading your deck. #realtalk

I don’t like the word hope. I like the plan.

I haven’t been able to engage with this deck.

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