Chai Discovery, an AI company specializing in predicting and reprogramming biochemical interactions to accelerate the development of therapeutics, has raised $70 million in a Series A financing round. The funding, led by Menlo Ventures with participation from their Anthology Fund, included new investors such as Yosemite and DCVC, as well as existing backers like Thrive Capital, OpenAI, and Dimension.
Founded in 2024 by Joshua Meier (formerly of Absci, Facebook AI, and OpenAI), Jack Dent (formerly of Stripe), and AI researchers Matthew McPartlon and Jacques Boitreaud, Chai Discovery aims to revolutionize the drug discovery process. Mikael Dolsten, M.D., Ph.D., former Chief Scientific Officer of Pfizer, is joining the board.
Last year, Chai raised $30 million in seed funding and released Chai-1, an advanced model for predicting molecular structures. Recently, the company unveiled Chai-2, which achieves a nearly 20% hit rate for antibody design, significantly surpassing traditional methods that typically screen millions of antibodies.
How the funding will be used: The new funding will help enhance the Chai platform, enabling applications to previously inaccessible targets, along with onboarding select partners.
KEY QUOTES:
“Progress towards game-changing drugs and treatments is far too slow, stymied by costly trial-and-error experiments. 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.”
Joshua Meier, CEO and co-founder
“I’m proud to join Chai Discovery and redefine biology from science into engineering. This is going to be an incredible journey with an incredible team.”
Dr. Dolsten
“Before Chai-2, the process was not unlike searching a giant bunch of keys for the right fit for a lock—but there are millions of keys. Now, it’s like having a master locksmith design exactly the right shape key, based only on your description of the lock. A company had spent more than three years and over $5 million on a problem. With Chai-2, we were able to find an experimentally validated solution within two weeks.“
Matthew McPartlon, co-founder
“Chai is an exceptional technical team building foundation models for biology to transform drug discovery. Chai-2 demonstrates amazing progress in antibody design, and we have seen a meaningful fraction of the biotech industry already apply for Chai-2 access. At Menlo, we invest deeply in both AI foundation models and technology-enabled biology–we believe Chai can help create better medicines faster.”
Greg Yap, Partner at Menlo Ventures
