Recursion
A public drug discovery company that photographs millions of cells and trains models on how disease changes them.
Highlights
- Phenomic imaging — millions of cellular images per week
- ML maps biology + chemistry interactions at scale
- BioHive supercomputer (Nvidia-powered)
- Merged with Exscientia 2024 — phenomics + structure
- Public on Nasdaq ($RXRX)
External link — opens recursion.com in a new tab. Recursion is a third-party product; we are not affiliated with it.
About Recursion
What it is
Recursion industrialises early drug discovery through phenomic imaging: capturing millions of cellular images a week, training models on the morphological signatures of disease and of treatment response, and using the resulting maps to find biological relationships. It runs BioHive, one of the largest supercomputers owned by a pharmaceutical company, merged with Exscientia in 2024 to add structure-based design, and is listed on Nasdaq as RXRX.
Why it's different
The approach is genuinely unusual. Most computational drug discovery starts from known biology and models a target; Recursion starts from images of cells and lets the model find relationships nobody hypothesised, which can surface connections that target-led work would never look for. The honest caveat is that this is an operating hypothesis, not a demonstrated one — the field's history is full of platforms that generated enormous data and few approved drugs, and being publicly traded means the claims are also investor communications. The read-out is the clinical pipeline over years.
How people use it
This is not software anyone outside the company uses. It belongs in a directory as one of the clearest examples of AI applied to something other than text and images, and as a reference point for how a data-generation-led approach differs from the structure-prediction work people associate with AlphaFold. Researchers follow its publications and its pipeline; everyone else can treat it as a case study.
Written by the n3os team. We are not affiliated with Recursion.
This listing was written from public information, without Recursion’s involvement. If you own it and something here is wrong — or you would rather not be listed at all — email us and we will correct or remove it.
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