Chai Discovery

Two of our co-founders Joshua Meier and Matthew McPartlon joined Pat Grady and Sonali Singh at Sequoia Capital on the Training Data podcast to talk about the future of AI-driven drug discovery, and how Chai is building the tools to enable the next generation of breakthrough medicines. They discuss how drug design is evolving into a digital-first engineering discipline, why pharma partnerships are the ultimate benchmark for a model's value, and what it'll take to go after diseases the industry has written off as undruggable. Check out the full conversation below.

We’re delighted to announce our third agreement this week, this time a collaboration with argenx, a global leader in immunology innovation. argenx has built one of biotechnology’s most productive antibody engines, combining deep immunology expertise with a high-powered antibody engineering team. We’ll be putting Chai’s frontier molecular design capabilities into the hands of argenx scientists, empowering them to get access to Chai’s AI platform and apply de novo antibody discovery across therapeutic targets. It’s been a landmark few days for Chai Discovery. From announcing our $400M Series C funding round and our collaboration with Novartis, to working with argenx, the pace towards better drug design is faster than ever. Full announcement in the comments.

Today we’re announcing our Series C fundraise of $400M at a $3.8B valuation. The round was led by Index Ventures alongside Kleiner Perkins, Sequoia Capital, and DIMENSION. They're joined by new investors Bain Capital Ventures (BCV), Battery Ventures, Baillie Gifford, BDT & MSD Partners, Sapphire Ventures, avra, and other notable firms. Existing investors Thrive Capital, OpenAI, Oak HC/FT, Menlo Ventures, General Catalyst, Glade Brook Capital Partners LLC,  Avenir, Lachy Groom and Yosemite also joined the round. We started Chai two years ago to build a world where new medicines are not found through trial and error, but designed with the precision, speed and scale of modern engineering. Deployment is the defining benchmark in AI-driven drug discovery. Today Chai’s models are at work where they matter most: inside the real-world workflows that ultimately shape the medicines of tomorrow.  Leading global pharmaceutical organizations, including Eli Lilly and Company, Pfizer and Novartis, are using our generative design suite - including our latest model, Chai-3 - to pursue critical targets that traditional computational and laboratory discovery methods have long struggled to reach. We expect the models to continue improving, so we're fortunate to partner with investors who share our conviction in the long-term opportunity ahead, and who bring the experience to help us scale what we're building. 

We’re delighted to announce our collaboration with Novartis. Building on a year-long technical engagement, we’re expanding our collaboration with Novartis to support broader deployment of our technology across multiple therapeutic programs. Novartis will gain access to our latest models for prediction and design, including Chai-3.

We’re delighted to announce a collaboration with Pfizer. Pfizer will be deploying Chai Discovery’s AI models to accelerate their drug discovery efforts, including our latest frontier model Chai-3 and a custom model leveraging Pfizer's proprietary data and tailored to their workflows. Chai-3 shows step-change improvements in AI-driven antibody design, doubling the success rate of its predecessor model and producing antibodies that meet required therapeutic standards. Read more about the partnership in the comments. At Chai, we're building a world where new medicines are not found through trial and error, but designed with the precision, speed and scale of modern engineering. If this kind of hard challenge speaks to you, we're always happy to hear from extraordinary people.

Faster drug discovery, optimized drug design, even programmable therapeutics - Nature Biotech took a look at the progress being made by AI biotechs and concluded that after years of hype, “this time may be different.” Thanks to Melanie Senior for interviewing Joshua Meier for the story, alongside Oak HC/FT Annie Lamont and several other leaders in the field. https://lnkd.in/gHE_HGCj

Chai Discovery is listed in this year’s Forbes AI 50 list. We started Chai Discovery with the belief that the same breakthroughs happening in language models and code generation could be applied to the molecules that make up life itself. That biology could be turned from a scientific discipline into something that looks more like engineering, and from there, the opportunities to improve the future of human health could be dramatic. A lot of people thought that was a stretch or an idea that wouldn’t become reality until a much distant future. What's happened since has surprised even us. Our models are now designing molecules with drug-like properties and hitting targets that were previously considered out of reach. They are being used by the largest pharmaceutical companies in the world. And we are really just getting started. None of this would have been possible without our entire team. As a founding team, we have always been hyper-focused on bringing together some of the most exceptional AI researchers and engineers in the world — people from OpenAI, Meta, Google, X, Stripe — who genuinely believe, as we do, that AI could change the trajectory of human health and medicine. Chai is continuing to grow quickly. If you're a world-class AI researcher or engineer who wants to work on one of the hardest and most consequential problems in science, come talk to us.

We’re getting ready to head to #NVIDIAGTC next week. We’ll be joining other NVIDIA Inception startups in the Exhibit Hall, chatting to those on the ground about our software-first approach to predicting and reprogramming molecular interactions. Going to be there? Let’s connect — you can find us at our booth in the HCLS Pavilion.