For many of the AI companies sprouting on the biopharma field, validation — often meaning confirmation of whether the targets and drugs they identified or generated would actually work — won’t come in years, if at all. But for BenchSci, the drug hunting field is their home turf.

To be sure, the Toronto-based startup is doing something very different from the rest of the pack. Rather than staking claims about the results of drug discovery, it’s out to change the process by hunkering down on a specific problem: helping scientists select the right reagents to conduct their preclinical experiments.

The Mayo Clinic is joining hands with a Silicon Valley VC firm to inject $60 million into nference, a Cambridge, MA-based player in the gold rush to capitalize on biopharma’s growing interest — and urge — to accelerate drug discovery and development using the latest machine learning tools.

While nference ostensibly belongs to a generation of software startups that cropped up around 2013, it doesn’t see itself as part of the AI mainstream, founder and CSO Venky Soundararajan tells Endpoints News. That’s why the A in their AI stands for augmented, not artificial.

Brendan Frey set out, when he began the project to pick out a lead program for Deep Genomics, to prove that the artificial intelligence systems his lab has designed can identify new drug targets and find a winning candidate much faster than traditional methods. Now that they have zeroed in on an antisense oligonucleotide exon-skipping therapy for a subtype of Wilson disease — selected out of 2,400 ailments and 120,000 underlying genetic mutations — as their face case, the Toronto-based biotech is ready to delve into new frontiers with their AI tech.

Days after news leaked that BenevolentAI had secured funding at a rate that would halve its $2 billion valuation, the machine learning startup officially announced it raised $90 million from Singapore-based Temasek for a minority stake.

The news deals another blow to embattled fund manager Neil Woodford. BenevolentAI was one of two biotech AI startups, along with Oxford Nanopore, Woodford was reportedly prepping for auction to raise cash for his still frozen Equity Income Fund. Nanopore’s $1.5 billion valuation remains steady, affirmed by fellow investor IP Group.

BenevolentAI is barely clinging to its unicorn status after its latest round of financing from Singapore’s Temasek, which would reportedly halve its $2 billion valuation — and deal another blow to troubled fund manager Neil Woodford.

Temasek will take a minority stake in a deal that values London-based BenevolentAI at $1 billion, the Sunday Times reported. A $115 million financing round last April — dedicated in part to scaling its drug development work — had donned a pre-money valuation of $2 billion.

The long list of major AI biopharma collaborations has gotten longer as one of the first artificial intelligence startups has inked its first deal in China.

San Francisco-based startup Atomwise has signed an agreement to develop targeted drugs with Hansoh Pharmaceuticals, a deal that could ultimately be worth up to $1.5 billion. Hansoh is flush with cash after a $1 billion IPO on the Hong Kong exchange in June.

Drug development is an arduous and expensive business. The promise of artificial intelligence is that machines can wean manufacturers away from the breadth of resources it takes to discover a potentially potent compound, and leverage the medical conditions it could be used to treat. Alex Zhavoronkov, whose Hong Kong-based AI-shop Insilico Medicine has entrenched itself in the tentacles of biopharma R&D, now has some data to bolster the fervor and investment that AI has drummed up.