Ordaōs Raises $5 Million in Seed to Accelerate Drug Design and Discovery

NEW YORK, Aug. 25, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- Ordaōs, a biotechnology company designing novel mini-proteins to help drug hunters deliver life-saving treatments, today announced the completion of $5M in seed financing to aid in new product development and expand partner acquisition efforts. The oversubscribed round was led by Middleland Capital's VTC Ventures with additional investments from Route 66 Ventures, Banyan Pacific Capital, IAG Capital Partners, and Citta Capital. Ordaōs is a human-enabled, machine-driven drug design company that leverages proprietary multitask meta-learning and reinforcement learning to create mini-proteins that enable targeted therapies to reduce patient suffering, improve health, and extend life.

"Ordaōs' class of mini-proteins, - Ordaōs miniPRO™ - transforms the role of proteins in drug discovery by providing the power and performance of antibodies, while being more stable, configurable and easier to manufacture," said David Longo, CEO of Ordaōs. "This investment will enable us to maximize drug candidate delivery speed, novelty, and probability of clinical success that provides drug hunters what they have been dreaming of."

Scott Horner, PhD, managing director at Middleland Capital said, "We have been studying the AI drug discovery sector for some time and were blown away at how effective the Ordaōs platform is in generating high-affinity hits, across several difficult to access drug targets. This team has built something really special here, and we are excited to partner with the company to realize the full potential of their novel mini-protein creation platform."

Ordaōs uses The Ordaōs Design Engine, to deliver true protein property design - leveraging continuous learning loops and proprietary data sets to translate human-targeted product criteria into machine-designed mini-proteins. Starting with amino acids, the Design Engine generates, appraises, and ranks billions of protein sequences and hundreds of thousands of protein structures and properties to create customized miniPRO™ proteins. These proteins are then rapidly evaluated in vitro to provide intelligent feedback on multiple design objectives including protein structure, binding specificity and affinity, solubility, stability, immunogenicity, and developability. This iterative process delivers optimized mini-proteins to meet the client's specific molecular target product profile (mTPP). They are also less likely to cause adverse side effects and are easier and less expensive to test, develop, and manufacture than traditional proteins. Using this approach, the Ordaōs Design Engine creates more ideal, unseen protein leads than others and can accelerate drug candidate development, increasing the probability of more therapeutically effective candidates. All of this provides clients with a high level of confidence in their investigational new drug (IND) applications.

Media Contact: Ryan Wagner (Ryan.wagner@ogilvy.com)

About Ordaōs Ordaōs is a human-enabled, machine-driven drug design company that helps birth novel therapies to reduce patient suffering, improve health, and extend life. Our flagship solution, miniPRO™ mini-proteins, enable drug hunters to deliver safer and more effective treatments in a fraction of the time of traditional discovery methods.

About VTC Ventures Managed by Middleland Capital, VTC Ventures is a private investment fund focused on early-stage life science and technology opportunities across the Commonwealth of Virginia and opportunities outside Virginia with a connection to Virginia Tech or Carilion Clinic. VTC Ventures aims to partner with exceptional management teams to commercialize innovative technologies, accelerate growth, and build long-term value. For more information, please visit www.vtcventures.com