Terray Therapeutics, a biotechnology company focused on improving human health by transforming the speed, cost, and success rate of small molecule drug development using computation integrated with novel data at scale, announced Series B funding of $120 million. The funding round was led by new investor Bedford Ridge Capital and existing investor NVentures (NVIDIA’s venture capital arm), with participation from new and existing investors, including Maverick Capital, Goldcrest Capital, Madrona Ventures, Two Sigma Ventures, XTX Ventures, Digitalis Ventures, and Alexandria Ventures. Sid Shenai partnered with Bedford Ridge Capital on this financing and will join Terray’s Board of Directors.
This funding will progress internal programs into clinical trials and further enhance Terray’s integrated AI platform, tNova, which powers both internal and partnered programs.
With its proprietary experimental platform, Terray built the world’s largest chemistry dataset, having quantitatively measured 5+ billion target-ligand interactions in the past 3 years–roughly 50X the entirety of all publicly available chemistry data. And this dataset is doubling annually. Terray’s unique data advantage enables best-in-class AI capabilities to identify and optimize novel small molecule solutions to the most complex problems. Terray applies this expertise to its internal pipeline focused on immunological diseases and to additional challenging targets in partnership with Bristol Myers Squibb and Calico.
Since the Series A funding round in 2021, Terray has solidified its position as a generative AI-driven small-molecule drug design leader. The notable milestones include:
— Rapidly progressed multiple internal immunology programs towards the clinic, all capitalizing on AI-driven optimization of chemistry starting points discovered de novo.
— Entered into multi-target partnership agreements with Calico and Bristol Myers Squibb to tackle challenging targets across various diseases.
— Published its industry-leading chemistry foundation model, COATI, and recently brought latent diffusion machine learning to small molecule design for the first time. These AI tools are co-pilots that Terray’s medicinal chemists use daily to explore the vast chemical space efficiently.
— Strengthened its position with key additions to its leadership team, including Feroze (Fez) Ujjainwalla as Chief Business Officer and Anna Goranson as Chief People Officer, as well as advisory and board appointments including John Maraganore, founding CEO of Alnylam Pharmaceuticals and veteran biotech industry leader, as Strategic Advisor and the addition of both Bassil Dahiyat, founding CEO of Xencor, and Sudha Parasuraman, a biotech leader, as members of the Board of Directors.
KEY QUOTES:
“We’re delighted that this funding will help us bring new medicines forward for patients in need. That’s why we all work at Terray. Knowledge of what causes human disease has exploded in the ‘omics’ era, but the ability to discover and develop new molecules to treat those diseases hasn’t kept pace. Trained on rapidly iterating, precise data generated at unprecedented scale in our labs, Terray’s AI will dramatically improve the success rate of small molecule development and bring relief to patients.”
-Jacob Berlin, Ph.D, co-founder and CEO of Terray Therapeutics
“Terray’s unique, high-quality data generation enables continuous advanced generative AI development, like their COATI models. Rapid experiments combined with advanced AI creates a molecule discovery and design flywheel able to take on the most difficult and yet to be discovered targets.”
-Kimberly Powell, vice president of healthcare at NVIDIA
