As the pandemic rages on, virtual care options have investors champing at the bit. Boston-based Pear Therapeutics is the latest to benefit, reeling in $80 million to commercialize its three prescription digital therapeutics.

The digital therapeutics umbrella encompasses technology like mobile apps and telemedicine platforms designed to prevent, treat or manage disease. Some are used alone, while others are combined with medication.

Evan Feinberg could have picked a better time to launch his AI biotech, Genesis. He announced a $4.1 million round last November; by March, South San Francisco, California was under lockdown.

Still, a year later, he can look back at his early tenure with a certain degree of satisfaction.

“To see the things we’ve accomplished, all from my couch?” Feinberg told Endpoints News. “It’s really bizarre.”

Bristol Myers Squibb is turning to one of the star upstarts in the machine learning world to go back to the drawing board and come up with the disease models needed to find drugs that can work against two of the toughest targets in the neuro world.

Daphne Koller’s well-funded insitro is getting $70 million in cash and near-term milestones to use their machine learning platform to create induced pluripotent stem cell-derived disease models for ALS and frontotemporal dementia.

Less than a week after Roche joined forces with Dyno Therapeutics to develop gene therapies using artificial intelligence, its giant subsidiary Genentech is hopping on the AI bandwagon with a different player.

Genentech has inked a deal with Stanford spinout Genesis Therapeutics to harness its AI power for drug development and discovery. Genesis is getting an upfront payment and milestones, but the companies are keeping the details under wraps for now. The Burlingame, CA-based biotech also stands to earn future royalties on any approved Genentech drugs that come from the deal.

A new company out of Toronto is seeking to put AI and machine learning to the test, using the advanced technology to identify targets in solid cancers and other challenging diseases. And it has the backing of the industry’s resident power couple.

Phenomic AI officially launched Wednesday with $6 million in seed funding and announced that Jim Allison and Pam Sharma have joined its scientific advisory board. The biotech is also bringing on new CSO Mike Briskin, who has a professional history with Allison and Sharma after working with them and Third Rock Ventures to found Jounce Therapeutics about a decade ago.

Jurgi Camblong has spent the last decade going from minor funding round to minor funding round for his startup, Sophia Genetics, adding hospitals in the UK, US, and Latin America and expanding the platform to handle more and more data. Now, Camblong says, the company has spread far enough and has now raised plenty of cash to clear one of its last hurdles.

In the sixth and largest funding round in their 9-year history, Sophia Genetics has raised $110 million to push forward its AI-based platform for genetic medicine with a renewed focus on taking their established infrastructure and using it help biopharma collect evidence and design trials. The round was led the Israeli firm aMoon and the Japanese firm Hitachi Ventures.

Before Tencent made its first foray into AI-aided drug discovery this July, the Chinese tech giant had bought itself a line into the burgeoning field.

Tencent had backed a US-China AI startup by the name of XtalPi late 2015, and kept following up through two $15 million and $46 million rounds through 2018. Now SoftBank, Morningside and the venture arm of a Chinese government-owned insurance group are all following its lead, headlining a Series C that brings in a whopping $318.8 million.

A Stanford spinout exploring how fungi can be sequenced to discover new medicines in oncology and infectious diseases now has significantly more cash to do so.

Early Tuesday morning, Hexagon Bio announced the closing of their Series A financing, pulling in $47 million from a group of investors led by The Column Group. The round, which also saw participation from 8VC and Two Sigma Ventures, will go toward creating a proprietary genomics database as well as building out a drug discovery team to develop the new compounds. Hexagon brought on Tod Smeal as its new CSO after he served in the same position at Lilly Research Labs.