Stanford-StartX Fund-backed TwoXar has added $10m in funding to its coffers thanks to SoftBank Ventures, Andreessen Horowitz and OS Fund.

TwoXar, a US-based biopharmaceutical company backed by university venture fund Stanford-Start X Fund, secured $10m in series A capital yesterday from investors led by SoftBank Ventures, the early-stage investment arm of telecoms group SoftBank.

VC firm Andreessen Horowitz, through its Bio Fund, and venture capital vehicle OS Fund also contributed to the round.

Founded in 2014, TwoXar has developed a drug discovery platform that relies on artificial intelligence (AI) technology to reduce the time it takes to identify candidates from years to weeks.

The company has entered collaboration agreements with multiple biopharmaceutical firms, drug developers and investors to generate a pipeline of drug candidates, focusing on diseases such as liver cancer, rheumatoid arthritis and type 2 diabetes.

The series A funding will go towards expanding the pipeline and accelerating preclinical development of existing candidates. JP Lee, managing director at SoftBank Ventures, and Vijay Pande, general partner at Andreessen Horowitz, have joined the board of directors.

TwoXar previously raised $4.3m in seed funding from Stanford-Start X Fund, Andreessen Horowitz’s Bio Fund and CLI Ventures in 2014, according to the latest press release, though the round was reported at the time as being only $3.4m in size.

Lee said: “The company’s AI-driven discovery platform has the potential to transform the identification of new medicines and dramatically improve the success rates of preclinical development.

“The TwoXar team has already established a number of collaborations with global biopharmaceutical leaders and demonstrated how candidates identified by their technology translate to successful in vivo studies.”