Chai Discovery, a San Francisco-based AI company focused on predicting and reprogramming biochemical molecule interactions, has raised a $130 million Series B financing round co-led by Oak HC/FT and General Catalyst, valuing the company at $1.3 billion.
The company said the financing follows recent technical progress tied to its latest models, including work it describes as enabling molecular designs with “developability” characteristics and improved performance against historically challenging targets. Chai also pointed to the rollout of Chai 2, which it characterizes as a zero-shot generative platform for de novo antibody design that achieves double-digit experimental success rates and represents a 100-fold improvement over earlier computational approaches.
Alongside the two lead investors, the round included participation from Thrive Capital, OpenAI, Dimension, Menlo Ventures, Lachy Groom, Yosemite, Neo, and SV Angel, with Emerson Collective and Glade Brook joining as new investors. Chai said the Series B brings its total funding to more than $225 million.
Chai plans to use the new capital to accelerate research and product development and to expand commercialization, as it works toward what it calls a computer-aided design suite for molecules. As part of the financing, Annie Lamont of Oak HC/FT and Hemant Taneja of General Catalyst are joining the company’s board.
The Series B comes months after a $70 million Series A round, as competition intensifies among AI-native drug discovery companies seeking to compress timelines from target selection through candidate design and early development.
KEY QUOTES:
“We’re standing on the precipice of a new era for the biopharmaceutical industry. We’re in awe of the rate of progress on the models – what looked like five-year problems just months ago are now getting solved in weeks. Our latest models can design molecules that have properties we’d want from actual drugs, and tackle challenging targets that have been out of reach.”
“These models will unleash a new wave of first-in-class and best-in-class therapeutics, and the early adopters in pharma will be the big winners.”
Josh Meier, Co-Founder and CEO, Chai Discovery
“We believe biology is becoming programmable, rewiring what was once an empirical art into an engineered discipline. Chai’s team is leading this transformation – advancing the technical frontier and expanding what’s possible in therapeutics.”
Elena Viboch, Managing Director, General Catalyst
“Nowhere is AI transformation more needed than in drug development – the process is slow, expensive, and imprecise. It can take over a decade and cost upwards of a billion dollars to bring a medicine from bench to bedside. The Chai Discovery team is rewriting that story, fusing world-class AI and biological expertise to dramatically accelerate how medicines are discovered.”
Annie Lamont, Co-Founder & Managing Partner, Oak HC/FT
