The Future Of Drug Discovery Is 4 Billion Years Old (Viswa Colluru, Founder & CEO at Enveda)
For decades, drug discovery has shifted away from nature and toward biology-first approaches. Viswa Colluru believes that shift was a catastrophic mistake. His company, Enveda Biosciences, has raised over $500 million to build a “search engine for nature’s chemistry.” The mission is personal: he grew up around his father’s pharmacy in India and later lost his mother to a treatable cancer whose medicine his family couldn’t afford. Many life-changing medicines, including morphine, aspirin, and metformin, originated in nature, but there has never been a reliable, scalable way to systematically explore its chemistry. Colluru founded Enveda in 2019 with $55,000 of his own savings to change that.
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- Uploaded May 26, 2026
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Speaker A: Medicines are hope. The way to make patients feel powerful is to put great medicines in their hands, which means both discovery and ultimately delivery. There's really only one problem in biotech. It's drugs that work in the lab don't work in people. And because my job was to create landscapes of where the industry was evolving and where Recursion's technology platform sat within that view, I made a striking observation that 100% of our collective human effort to solve that gap lie in the biology bucket. Most often we tend to conflate innovation and novelty, but if I look around, most things that have changed the fabric of our lived experience were actually not new when they did so.
And so if you make the calculation that most ideas that change the trajectory of human life are actually old, then you're increasing your odds that you are on the inflection. Even LLMs, when they changed the world, were like, by AI terms, fairly old, nearly a decade. Speaker B: A third of all drugs ever approved by the FDA owe their origins to a molecule first found in nature. Aspirin from willow bark. Morphine from poppies. Metformin from a plant called goatsroot. Despite that, at some point the pharmaceutical industry walked away, moved in a different direction, convinced that synthetic chemistry and rational drug design were the future.
Viswa Kuluru thinks that was a catastrophic mistake. His company, Enveda Biosciences, has raised over $500 million to build a search engine for nature's chemistry, using AI to decode the millions of molecules that evolution spent 4 billion years perfecting. Since its founding in 2019, Enveda has identified 18 candidate drugs with 3 in trials, pioneering a radically more efficient and economical model in the process. In our conversation, Viswa and I discuss the deeply personal reason he got into drug discovery, what competitive table tennis taught him about managing a company, and why he believes the pharmaceutical industry's biggest breakthroughs might come from the oldest laboratory on Earth.
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