Post by True Ventures

Drug discovery didn’t hit a wall. It just stopped looking in one of the most important places: nature. Nature wasn’t abandoned because it lacked value. It was just too hard to analyze. For years, pharma moved toward biology-first approaches that felt more predictable. In the process, it stepped away from natural compounds, even though many of our most important medicines started there. Enveda is built on a simple idea: nature is full of potential. It’s just been too hard to search. For Founder Viswa Colluru, PhD, that belief is personal. He grew up around his father’s pharmacy in India and later lost his mother to a treatable cancer because the medicine was too expensive. That experience shaped what he chose to build. In 2019, he started Enveda with $55K and one question: What if we could search nature’s chemistry the way we search the internet? Because drugs like Aspirin and Metformin came from nature, but we’ve never had a scalable way to explore it. Enveda is building that system. So far: 18 drug candidates identified 3 in clinical trials (eczema, obesity, ulcerative colitis) ~$1M per candidate vs. $10–15M industry average Enveda is reopening a part of discovery we stopped exploring, and now we have the tools to do it right. The recent podcast, "The $1B Search for Hidden Plant Drugs", by Mario Gabriele, is worth a listen if you’re thinking about where biotech is heading, or how personal experiences shape what founders choose to build. Tune in to the podcast, The Generalist: https://lnkd.in/gWf-nhF8