Chai Discovery, a San Francisco-based AI biotech focused on predicting and reprogramming biochemical molecule interactions to transform drug discovery, announced it has raised $130 million in a Series B financing round co-led by Oak HC/FT and General Catalyst, bringing the company’s valuation to $1.3 billion and total funding to more than $225 million. This funding comes shortly after the company’s $70 million Series A and the launch of its Chai-2 platform, which has demonstrated the ability to design molecules with desirable “developability” properties and to tackle historically hard-to-drug targets, signaling rapid progress in its AI-powered platform. “We’re standing on the precipice of a new era for the biopharmaceutical industry,” said Josh Meier, co-founder and CEO of Chai Discovery, adding that recent advances have compressed what once were multi-year problems into solutions achieved in weeks and that “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.
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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.” The round included participation from existing investors such as Thrive Capital, OpenAI, Dimension, Menlo Ventures, Lachy Groom, Yosemite, Neo, and SV Angel, along with new investors Emerson Collective and Glade Brook, and will be used to accelerate research, expand commercialization efforts and further develop Chai’s “computer-aided design suite” for molecules. Elena Viboch, Managing Director at General Catalyst, emphasized her firm’s belief that “biology is becoming programmable, rewiring what was once an empirical art into an engineered discipline,” and Oak HC/FT’s Annie Lamont highlighted the need for AI to address the slow, costly, and imprecise traditional drug-development process by dramatically speeding discovery.