
Recursion CSO heads west for mini-brain upstart; Novartis vet steps up to the plate as CFO for Andrew Hirsch at C4 Therapeutics
A few months ago, as Recursion hammered out an IPO that would value them at over $3 billion, its CSO, Sharath Hegde, hopped on a plane and flew to San Francisco to visit a small, modestly backed startup, working out of an unmarked warehouse between a brewery and an air-conditioning seller off the highway.
Hegde had joined Recursion in June 2019, a month before they hauled in a $121 million Series C. It was an odd choice for the AI biotech. Recursion claimed they could remake the drug industry by generating huge datasets from their automated labs and running them through state of-the-art machine learning algorithms. Hegde was an old-fashioned drug discoverer, a pharmacologist who had spent the last 20 years playing with molecules the traditional way at Theravance.
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