Biotech is becoming saturated with machine learning companies promising to reinvent and hasten drug development, but few, if any, have amassed the war chest Daphne Koller has.

Entering Tuesday, the former Stanford professor, MacArthur Fellowship recipient, Coursera founder and chief computing officer of Google’s secretive anti-aging biotech Calico had raised $100 million for her AI startup insitro. Now she’s raised $143 million more.

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In September 2019, Trucode Gene Repair launched, after two-plus years of early development, with $34 million from GV and Kleiner Perkins and ambitious plans to take on the raft of CRISPR companies with a new form of gene editing.

Those plans, though, would only last a few months. By February, company leadership was already pivoting, filing a trademark and domain name for a new company, called Vera Therapeutics. On Monday, they completed the switch, “launching” with an $80 million Series C round led by Abingworth and plans to focus their efforts on atacicept, a 20-year-old molecule now in development for kidney disease.

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Following a record year for IPOs — in terms of both proceeds and count — there’s already a long lineup of biotechs ready to jump onto Nasdaq in the new year. The companies are likely looking for much higher raises than they initially projected on their S-1s. Now it’s time to see if investors are still hungry for another round of biotech stocks.

Sana helped set the pace early on, as its founders look to divvy up a fortune from their IPO. And late last week 5 more biotechs crowded in, looking to pick up the pace where 2020 left off. Here they are:

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Under science chief Dan Skovronsky, Eli Lilly has taken some big swings at next-gen therapies, including trying to find the next big thing in oncology. Now, after one early failure in the field, Lilly is going back to the bispecific antibody well with a new deal with a Dutch biotech.

Lilly will pay $40 million upfront with an additional $20 million equity stake in Merus NV to identify and develop three bispecific antibodies looking to engage the CD3 antigen on T cells and redirect immune cells, the Indianapolis pharma giant said Tuesday.

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Going into his first JP Morgan conference, Sekar Kathiresan had some major news to share. His ambitious cardiovascular-focused startup, Verve Therapeutics, had designated the PCSK9 base editor as its lead program, homed in on severe heterozygous familial hypercholesterolemia as the first indication, and released animal data suggesting the in vivo edits to the monkey livers last up to six months. For a company that had just been in the public for less than a year, “it was wonderful.”

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