Insilico Medicine vs Recursion (2026)
Both are AI drug discovery companies with their own clinical pipelines, and they differ in what they sell. Insilico Medicine, listed in Hong Kong, licenses its Pharma.AI software as well as developing medicines: PandaOmics for target identification, Chemistry42 for generative molecular design, inClinico for predicting trial outcomes, and a PandaOmics Box for local deployment. Recursion generates biology at scale in automated labs, trains foundation models on more than 50 petabytes of its own data, and works through its own pipeline and partnerships rather than selling software. If your team wants to run the tools itself, Insilico licenses them. If you want a partner with an experimental engine behind the predictions, Recursion's model is the loop between its labs and its models.
- Software a team can license across the discovery chain, from target identification to generative chemistry and trial outcome prediction.
- Local deployment through the PandaOmics Box, and client work under an ISO 27001 certified security management system.
- Its own clinical programs developed on the same suite.
- Automated labs running up to two million experiments a week, feeding foundation models trained on more than 50 petabytes of the company's own data.
- Published methods and public releases, including Phenom, MolE, TxPert, RxRx3 and OpenPhenom.
- Seven internal programs in oncology and rare disease, several in clinical studies.
This comparison is published by AI Health Index, an independent research platform that compares healthcare AI vendors objectively. Insilico Medicine and Recursion are each graded against the same capability taxonomy, from each vendor's own public materials and the regulatory record, under the AI Health Index verification standard. No vendor pays for placement, and no vendor has reviewed this page. How this evidence is graded
Plain facts
| Fact | Insilico Medicine | Recursion |
|---|---|---|
| Primary category | Drug Discovery AI | Drug Discovery AI |
| Founded | 2014 | Not recorded |
| Headquarters | Cambridge, Massachusetts | Salt Lake City, UT |
| Website | insilico.com | recursion.com |
Side by Side
Select any grade to read the note behind it.
Product updates
The latest logged changes from each vendor, newest first, each linked to its source.
Insilico Medicine
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Clinical evidence
Insilico posted a medRxiv preprint on the models that score clinical trials in its inClinico platform, trained only on what was known when each trial was registered.
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Product / capability
Insilico announced that Model Context Protocol servers are now available across its Pharma.AI software, so outside AI agents can connect directly to its biology, chemistry and biologics engines, including Generative Biologics, PandaOmics and Chemistry42, and run multistep discovery workflows.
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Model / architecture
Insilico released a set of small language models trained as scientific specialists for chemistry and biology through its MMAI Gym for Science framework.
Source
Each vendor in one paragraph
Written to be quoted whole. Each paragraph opens the AI Health Index profile of the vendor: what the product is, who buys it and what it does.
Insilico Medicine is a generative AI drug discovery company (HKEX: 3696), headquartered in Cambridge, Massachusetts with operations in Hong Kong, Abu Dhabi and Shanghai, that both licenses software and develops its own medicines.
Source: AI Health Index, September 2026
Recursion (Nasdaq: RXRX) is a Salt Lake City drug discovery company built around the Recursion OS, which pairs automated wet labs running up to 2 million experiments a week with machine learning foundation models trained on the resulting 50 petabyte plus dataset of cellular images, transcriptomics and chemistry, in a loop where predictions are tested in the lab and fed back into training. Its combination with Exscientia in November 2024 added generative chemistry design and automated synthesis.
Source: AI Health Index, September 2026
Questions buyers ask
How do Insilico Medicine and Recursion work with the EHR?
Insilico describes a generic integration path: the suite runs on the client's preferred cloud (AWS, Azure or others as specified), a PandaOmics Box is offered for local deployment, and the company has published work on connecting its tools to other software through standard model context interfaces. The electronic lab notebook Insilico describes among its security controls is an internal system.
With Recursion, the platform runs on the company's own experimental data and on licensed datasets, including human genomic and clinical data from outside data partners, and its outputs feed internal and partnered programs. From the AI Health Index, drawn from each vendor's own published materials and the regulatory record, verified September 28, 2026. No vendor pays for placement.
How are Insilico Medicine and Recursion priced and sold?
Each product page routes to a request form, a PandaOmics Box is offered alongside the hosted products, and as a listed company Insilico reports its own financial results, which show its revenue rather than a customer's cost.
Recursion sells no software license; it works with pharmaceutical partners through discovery collaborations and also develops its own pipeline, and the partners page describes pharmaceutical, technology and data partnerships. From the AI Health Index, drawn from each vendor's own published materials and the regulatory record, verified September 28, 2026. No vendor pays for placement.
How do Insilico Medicine and Recursion handle patient data?
With Insilico Medicine, the company's published privacy policy (effective October 30, 2020) covers the company website rather than the software.
Recursion's home page features a post on "leveraging the power of patient data" in drug discovery, and its data corpus includes material licensed from companies holding human genomic and clinical data. No published statement covers consent provenance for that licensed data, the de-identification standard applied, permitted secondary uses, retention, or what happens to trained model representations if a license ends. From the AI Health Index, drawn from each vendor's own published materials and the regulatory record, verified September 28, 2026. No vendor pays for placement.
Which settings and specialties do Insilico Medicine and Recursion cover?
For Insilico Medicine, results sit where the programs have run: a fibrosis candidate in Phase III, thirteen programs cleared for IND, and published work behind them.
With Recursion, the internal pipeline concentrates on oncology (solid tumors, lymphoma, B-cell malignancies, small cell lung cancer) and rare disease (familial adenomatous polyposis, hypophosphatasia), with clinical studies running in both. From the AI Health Index, drawn from each vendor's own published materials and the regulatory record, verified September 28, 2026. No vendor pays for placement.
Related comparisons
Other published head to head assessments involving these vendors or their closest peers.
Both records were reviewed on this site in September 2026. Neither publishes prices; Insilico's software terms are quoted, and Recursion works through partnerships.
Ask both how much of each clinical program's design came from the AI platform and how much from conventional medicinal chemistry.