Yoneda Labs, a company that went through the Y Combinator startup accelerator and is building a foundation model for chemists working in drug discovery, announced it has raised $4 million in seed capital from Khosla Ventures, 500 Emerging Europe, 468 Capital, Fellows Fund, and Y Combinator.
Over 400,000 chemists work in chemical manufacturing around the world. While scientists have started to utilize AI in drug discovery and design, the chemists responsible for synthesizing the drugs are forced to run trials in wet labs without much automation, simulation tools, or other computational support. So, the pharmaceutical and chemical manufacturing industries burn billions of dollars each year on failed chemical experiments.
Yoneda Labs was created by a group from the University of Cambridge with backgrounds in chemistry, robotics, and machine learning. One of the founders, Jan Oboril, was working on drug development at a major pharmaceutical company. He felt he wasted hundreds of hours running trials in the lab that could be replaced with machine learning algorithms that could run the same experiments in silico.
Upon joining forces with co-founders Michal Mgeladze-Arciuch, who worked on machine learning algorithms at Jane Street and researched large AI models at UC Berkeley, and Daniel Vlasits – who won an international robotics competition, the team built an initial prototype that improved Jan’s process in the lab and was accepted to Y Combinator.
The team identified 20,000 chemical reactions at Y Combinator to generate proprietary data for their foundation model. And in a small-scale trial, the models suggested good conditions in 95% of cases, a stark improvement to the industry standard in which most experiments fail.
With this funding round, they plan to build out a robotics lab capable of running experiments on the remaining 20,000 reactions to continue training the first-ever generalizable AI model for chemists. Later this year, they plan to be able to run and analyze 200 experiments per day, the equivalent output of roughly 20 full-time chemists.
KEY QUOTES:
“When a chemist wants to couple two molecules together, they are left to old-school literature search and trial-and-error methods in a lab. At Yoneda, our vision is to build a foundation AI model that analyzes and predicts what will happen before a chemist has to run their experiment. This would increase their productivity by an order of magnitude and potentially enable the creation of new drugs that isn’t currently possible to do cost-effectively at scale.”
– Michal Mgeladze-Arciuch, founder and CEO of Yoneda Labs
“Machine learning and generative AI models have already begun to accelerate physics-oriented fields like aerospace engineering. Chemistry will be no different and the team at Yoneda Labs has a novel approach to creating a foundation model for chemistry that could change the way chemicals are manufactured and improve the drug discovery process.”
– Jon Chu, partner at Khosla Ventures
