# Recursion Pharmaceuticals **Type:** venture **Status:** Draft **Confidence:** Medium **Focus:** AI drug discovery, life sciences, computational biology **Stage:** Public company, clinical-stage TechBio **Location:** Salt Lake City, UT **Updated:** 2026-05-09 **Needs-reviewed:** 2026-05-09 **Hero:** /img/heroes/front/recursion-1600.webp **Hero caption:** *Recursion scientists in the company's automated wet-lab, Salt Lake City — temporary hotlinked image from Recursion's website; image rights have not yet been cleared.* **Pull:** *Industrializing drug discovery on more than fifty petabytes of multimodal biological and chemical data.* ## Summary Recursion is a Salt Lake City TechBio company trying to industrialize drug discovery through large-scale biological data, automated experiments, machine learning, and clinical development. Its public materials describe the Recursion OS as a platform spanning physical experimentation and in-silico analysis, backed by more than 50 petabytes of multimodal biological and chemical data. For the Great Work Utah wiki, Recursion is one of the clearest examples of an ambitious Utah company at the intersection of AI, biology, and therapeutics. It is not just a local biotech employer. It is an attempt to make biology more computable. ## Impact The available evidence suggests Recursion matters because it is attacking one of the largest bottlenecks in medicine: the cost, time, and failure rate of discovering new drugs. Recursion's own mission page says traditional discovery often takes more than a decade, costs around $2 billion, and sees roughly 90 percent of drugs fail in clinical trials. The impact case is strongest if Recursion's platform helps identify better targets, compress early discovery, or gives partner pharma companies a better map of disease biology. The harder-to-prove claim is clinical translation: impressive cellular and computational systems still have to become medicines that work in patients. ## What They Are Building Recursion is building a data and experimentation platform for drug discovery. Public materials emphasize phenomics, transcriptomics, proteomics, ADME, de-identified patient data, automated labs, precision chemistry, and BioHive-2, which Recursion describes as the most powerful supercomputer in pharma. The available public framing makes Recursion relevant to machine learning engineers, computational biologists, wet-lab scientists, and platform builders who want to work on real experiments at machine scale rather than thin AI wrappers around literature search. ## What They Need Now Likely needs include people who can connect AI systems to biological reality: computational biologists, machine learning infrastructure engineers, assay development scientists, medicinal chemists, clinical operators, and product-minded platform leaders who can serve both internal programs and pharma partners. For a match engine, Recursion is most relevant to candidates who want a scaled organization, public-company rigor, and a serious AI-biology interface. It may be less ideal for someone who wants very early startup ambiguity or full control over scientific direction. ## Who Could Help Useful helpers include translational medicine advisors, clinical trial operators, pharma partnership builders, computational biology leaders, platform product executives, and legal or regulatory specialists who understand data-rich drug development. The company may also be a useful reference point for researchers commercializing biology tools: even if Recursion is not the right partner, its public model helps explain what a scaled AI-biology platform requires. ## Utah Context Recursion is headquartered in downtown Salt Lake City and is a visible anchor for Utah's life-sciences and AI community. Its presence gives the state a credible example that advanced biology, compute infrastructure, and public-market ambition can coexist outside the Boston and Bay Area biotech centers. ## Evidence - [Official Website: Recursion Mission Page](recursion-mission.md) ## Open Questions - Which Recursion programs are currently the strongest evidence that platform discovery is translating into clinical value? - How much of Recursion's current impact will come from internal pipeline assets versus partner use of the platform? - The current hero is hotlinked from Recursion's marketing site, and image rights have not been cleared. Replace with a Recursion-approved or independently licensed image before any production use.