Chai Discovery, a company that uses AI to predict and reprogram interactions between biochemical molecules, has secured $70 million in a Series A funding in a round led by Menlo Ventures, with an investment from their Anthology Fund, a joint partnership with Anthropic.
Yosemite, DST Global Partners, SV Angel, Avenir and DCVC participated in the round, along with existing investors Thrive Capital, OpenAI, Dimension, Neo, Lachy Groom and Fred Ehrsam.
WHAT IT DOES
In July, Chai Discovery introduced Chai-2, a series of models that achieve double-digit hit rates in de novo antibody design.
The International Journal of Molecular Sciences defines de novo drug design as a computational approach that generates novel molecular structures from atomic building blocks with no a priori relationships.
Standard methods include structure-based and ligand-based design, which depend on the properties of the active site of a biological target or its known active binders, respectively.
In a statement, the company said that when entering only the target antigen (a substance that causes the immune system to produce antibodies against it) and epitope (a part of a molecule that an antibody will recognize and bind to), Chai‑2 can produce successful binders from square one against a broad range of targets.
"This means that scientists working on a target antigen, a specific disease-causing protein such as a virus or type of cancer, can use Chai-2 to design, from scratch, completely new antibodies that can hit the right spot," according to Chai Discovery.
The company will use the funds to develop the Chai platform and onboard select partners.
"Progress towards game-changing drugs and treatments is far too slow, stymied by costly trial-and-error experiments," Joshua Meier, CEO and cofounder of Chai Discovery, said in a statement.
"Chai Discovery exists to push the boundaries of what's possible in this field, applying frontier AI to transform biology from science to engineering, so that breakthroughs can be designed rather than simply discovered."
MARKET SNAPSHOT
Last year, Chai Discovery closed a $30 million seed round led by Thrive Capital, OpenAI and Dimension. Shortly after that, the company released Chai-1, an open-source foundation model for molecular structure prediction.
Other companies in the de novo antibody design space include Absci, which partnered with AMD in January to deploy AMD Instinct accelerators and ROCm software to power vital AI drug-discovery workloads, as well as Absci's advanced de novo antibody-design models.
In addition, AMD made a $20 million investment in Absci. The investment will be structured as a private investment in public equity.
The strategic partnership aims to support Absci's mission of creating biologics for patients faster using AI tools for complex biological modeling.
