10x Science, an artificial intelligence company focused on molecular-level protein characterization, announced that it has raised $4.8 million in seed funding led by Initialized Capital, with participation from Y Combinator, Civilization Ventures, Founder Factor, and a group of strategic angel investors. The round was oversubscribed and will support the company’s efforts to scale its platform and expand partnerships across the life sciences ecosystem.
The company is building AI infrastructure designed to address a critical bottleneck in drug development, protein characterization. This process is essential for determining whether biologic therapies, including cancer immunotherapies and gene therapies, are safe, effective, and manufacturable. Despite its importance, the work is still largely manual, requiring specialized scientists to spend weeks or months interpreting complex mass spectrometry data using legacy tools.
10x Science’s platform automates this process by applying AI models that can analyze hundreds of thousands of spectra, identify molecular structures and chemical modifications, and deliver explainable insights in minutes. This capability is designed to significantly accelerate drug development timelines while improving accuracy and scalability.
The company was founded by David Stephen Roberts, Andrew Reiter, and Vishnu Tejus, who met while working in the Nobel Prize-winning laboratory of Carolyn Bertozzi. The founding team combines expertise in chemistry, biology, and artificial intelligence, with backgrounds spanning academia and entrepreneurship.
The platform introduces a “deep memory” capability that allows it to learn from each dataset over time, building a continuously evolving understanding of molecular profiles across different organizations. Unlike traditional tools that reset with each analysis, 10x Science’s system accumulates knowledge, enabling more accurate and context-aware insights.
The company is positioning its technology as a foundational layer for the pharmaceutical industry, where demand for protein characterization is rapidly increasing due to the growing complexity of biologic therapies. The platform has applications across multiple domains, including cancer research, neurodegenerative diseases, infectious diseases, and agricultural biotechnology.
With the new funding, 10x Science plans to expand its engineering team, deepen collaborations with pharmaceutical and biotech partners, and continue developing its AI models to support a broader range of molecular analysis use cases.
The company’s long-term vision is to create a shared layer of molecular intelligence that aggregates insights across the life sciences, enabling researchers and organizations to better understand the biological mechanisms underlying health and disease.
KEY QUOTES:
“The people building AI have historically not been life scientists, and the life scientists have not been building AI; we come from both worlds. We realized we could build something that had never existed: an AI system with the scientific depth to reason about proteins the way the best experts do, but at a speed and scale no human team can match. For the first time, we can begin to ask the question that the entire pharmaceutical industry has never been able to answer: across thousands of characterized therapeutics, what molecular patterns distinguish the drugs that work from the ones that do not.”
David Stephen Roberts, Co-Founder And CEO, 10x Science
“AI has already made meaningful contributions to biology at the prediction layer, asking what a protein might look like based on its sequence. What no one has built is AI for the characterization layer, where you interpret real experimental data from real therapeutic molecules: that is the layer where drug development decisions are actually made, and it has remained painfully manual.”
Andrew Reiter, Co-Founder And COO, 10x Science
“This is a critical moment in pharma; the industry is looking for AI that actually works, and protein characterization is needed at every stage of the drug lifecycle regardless of whether any single drug succeeds or fails. We’re talking about the infrastructure layer of drug development. The 10x Science founders helped build this field, and they’re now showing up with a product that solves an expensive, critically important problem. There is no more credible team to do this.”
Zoe Perret, Partner, Initialized Capital
“Biologics are the fastest-growing segment of the pharmaceutical industry and are the most complex to develop. Every antibody, every cell therapy, every engineered protein requires characterization at a level of detail that existing tools simply weren’t designed to handle. The field has outgrown its infrastructure. That’s not sustainable. I’ve spent my career at the intersection of chemistry and biology, trying to understand how molecules behave in living systems. The biggest constraint I see across the field, whether in academic labs or industry, is the gap between the data we can generate and the insights we can extract. 10x Science closes that gap.”
Carolyn Bertozzi, Professor, Stanford University
