According to media reports, ChAI Discovery, an artificial intelligence biotechnology startup founded nearly half a year ago, raised nearly US$30 million at a valuation of US$150 million in its latest round of financing.
Chai’s current round of seed financing was led by Thrive Capital, a well-known venture capital institution. Investors include OpenAI, the world’s leading artificial intelligence company, and DIMension Capital.
According to Chai, the AI-based models developed by the company can predict the structures of biochemical molecules and reprogram their interactions, a process that is critical for developing new drugs.
"We want to transform biology from a science to engineering," said co-founder and CEO Joshua Meier.
In recent years, there has been great excitement about the potential of AI to accelerate drug discovery. Two years ago, Google DeepMind's "AlphaFold" tool shocked the scientific world with its ability to predict millions of protein structures.
In June this year, EvolutionaryScale, a leading AI research laboratory in the field of biology, launched an AI model "ESM3" that can generate new proteins, and received US$142 million in seed financing.
On Monday, Chai also released its first open source molecular structure model "Chai-1", accompanied by a technical report comparing its performance with AlphaFold and ESM3. Chai's model performed better, Meier said.
"We're seeing a 10 to 20 percent improvement in success rates on the various problems we use it to solve," he said. "For example, our model is better at tasks that are critical to drug discovery compared to AlphaFold." Performance is even better.”
Before founding Chai, Meier was chief artificial intelligence officer at biotech company Absci Corp and worked as a researcher at Meta and OpenAI.
In March of this year, Meier co-founded Chai with Stripe engineer Jack Dent. Meier said Chai currently has fewer than 10 employees but has attracted top talent from companies such as OpenAI, Google and Meta.
Co-founder and president Jack Dent said Chai’s first model is free and there are no plans to commercialize its technology.
According to PitchBook data, venture capital institutions invested nearly $30 billion in biopharmaceutical startups in 2023. Google AI director Demis Hassabis believes the market could be worth more than $100 billion.
For Chai, competition comes not only from other AI startups but also from big players like Google. Miles Grimshaw, a partner at Thrive Capital who led the financing, said, “This field is big enough to accommodate everyone.”
"One of the nice things about working in this field is that just getting better in one area is profitable," Grimshaw said.