Numerate has been applying modern machine learning techniques and large scale cloud computing to problems in life sciences since its founding in 2007.The primary focus has been on in silico small mol. drug design, with a proprietary platform that solves the problem of multiple, often competing, objectives of efficacy and safety.The approach combines machine learning with medicinal chem. to move the design test cycles from the lab to the cloud and deliver synthesizable, active, selective, safe, and patentable leads.In this approach, Numerate analyzes libraries of hundreds of billions of virtual compounds to select the ones with highest probability of success leveraging all known relevant data.While the company is very much a "traditional" platform + pipeline company today, the path through financing and business model space has presented interesting challenges and multiple, simultaneous chicken-and-egg problems that had to be dealt within order to get to the desired model.