Recursion Pharmaceuticals Announces Pivot From AI Drug Discovery To Sustainable Footwear

SALT LAKE CITY, UT—Recursion Pharmaceuticals, which has spent hundreds of millions of dollars building an AI-powered drug discovery pipeline, announced Wednesday that it is pivoting to sustainable footwear, a move that immediately added $600 million in market value.

“We saw what Allbirds did and thought, if a shoe company can become an AI company overnight, why can’t an AI company become a shoe company,” said CEO Chris Gibson, standing in front of a slide that read “SOLE DISCOVERY” in the same font previously used for “DRUG DISCOVERY.” “Honestly, their pivot validated something we’d been feeling internally for a while, which is that footwear is a more tractable problem for AI than disease.”

The company, which will rebrand as Recursion Footworks, said it expects to ship its first product — a $94 sneaker made from sustainably sourced eucalyptus fiber called “REC-184” — by the end of Q2. The shoe was designed using Recursion's proprietary machine learning platform, which analyzed approximately 400 million images of feet before recommending a shape that Gibson described as "biologically informed" and that a product tester described as "a shoe."

Investors reacted with an enthusiasm that had been notably absent during the company’s eight years of attempting to cure disease. “This is the most exciting thing Recursion has done,” said one analyst at Jefferies. “The shoes have a much clearer path to revenue than the oncology pipeline. Frankly, most things do.”

At press time, the company’s website had received 1,400 pre-orders, which Recursion noted in an SEC filing represented “the company’s most successful Phase III to date.”