Aureka Biotechnologies has raised $100 million in Series B financing to advance its biological foundation models and closed-loop AI-native drug discovery infrastructure, bringing the company’s total funding to nearly $200 million.
Granite Asia exclusively funded the first tranche of the financing, while a strategic investor led a subsequent tranche. HighLight Capital also participated alongside follow-on investors MPCi and NRL Capital.
Aureka plans to direct the proceeds primarily toward research and large-scale training of its next generation of biological foundation models, including work in de novo molecular design, biological structure modeling and function prediction.
The company will also expand Lab-in-the-Loop, its experimental feedback platform connecting AI models with proprietary single-cell functional screening, high-throughput validation and drug development systems.
Founded in 2023, Aureka is developing an AI-native drug discovery platform combining foundation models, AI agents, digital biology and experimental infrastructure.
Its Lab-in-the-Loop approach allows models to propose molecular designs and scientific hypotheses that can be experimentally tested. The resulting functional data is then fed back into the foundation and project-specific models for continued training and optimization.
Aureka’s proprietary biological foundation model, AuraIDE, is trained on internal protein co-evolution data and designed to model relationships among protein sequences, structures, evolution and function.
OpenDDE, the open-source version of AuraIDE, ranks among leading open-source biomolecular models in independent third-party evaluations, according to the company.
Aureka has also established partnerships with multiple global pharmaceutical companies and said it has generated tens of millions of dollars in revenue over the past two years.
KEY QUOTES:
“When leading biological foundation models are genuinely combined with R&D infrastructure that can run at scale, we are no longer simply making one step of drug discovery more efficient. We are building the next-generation drug discovery engine, one that can understand, generate and predict biological systems.”
“This is a critical step in Aureka’s progress toward a biological world model.”
Dr. Weian Zhao, Founder and Chief Executive Officer of Aureka Biotechnologies
“AI-driven drug discovery is moving beyond competition on isolated model capability and into a new phase defined by the co-evolution of data, models and experiments in a closed loop.”
Yinghui Kuang, Granite Asia
