Recursion Pharmaceuticals soars 121% after Nvidia invests $50 million in the biotech for AI drug discovery

• Recursion Pharmaceuticals stock soared as much as 121% on Wednesday after it received an investment from Nvidia.
• Nvidia said it would invest $50 million in the company as it works to use AI for drug discovery.
• The surge in Recursion added more than $1 billion to its market valuation on Wednesday.

Shares of Recursion Pharmaceuticals soared as much as 121% on Wednesday after it said Nvidia invested $50 million in the biotech company.

Recursion, which utilizes artificial intelligence to help speed up the drug discovery process, said Nvidia's investment would accelerate its work in AI-powered drug development.

Both companies will collaborate on software for the biotech industry, with the hopes of more quickly creating patient treatments for a wide variety of ailments and diseases.

Recursion said it would rely on Nvidia's cloud services to develop its AI-enabled drug discovery models. Earlier this year, Nvidia announced the launch of BioNeMo, an AI drug discovery platform targeting the biotech industry.

"With our powerful dataset and NVIDIA's accelerated computing capabilities, we intend to create groundbreaking foundation models in biology and chemistry at a scale unlike anything that has ever been released in the biological space," Recursion CEO Chris Gibson said in a press release.

Recursion has a library of more than 3 trillion searchable gene and compound relationships, which will serve as the foundation of the company's drug discovery program. 

The investment from Nvidia was executed as a private investment in a public equity, so the terms of the deal were not disclosed. 

Recursion shared its outlook for 2023 with Insider earlier this year, which included an update on the four drugs it currently has under development for rare diseases, as well as details on a web application it recently launched called MolRec.

Shares of Recursion surged to a high of $14.99 in Wednesday's trading session before paring its gains to about 80%. The stock added more than $1 billion to its market valuation. Recursion went public in April 2021 and surged to a post-IPO high of $42.81. Since then, it has dropped 72%.