<p><strong>SAN FRANCISCO</strong> &#8212; Chai Discovery, the AI company that predicts and reprograms the interactions between biochemical molecules, has raised $130 million Series B financing round co-led by Oak HC/FT and General Catalyst.</p>
<p>The Series B round brings Chai’s total funding to more than $225 million and values the company at $1.3 billion. As part of the funding, Annie Lamont from Oak HC/FT and Hemant Taneja from General Catalyst will be joining the board.</p>
<p>The news comes on the heels of Chai’s most recent announcement<sup>1</sup>, where the company showed their latest models can now design molecules with important “developability” properties and tackle “hard-to-drug” targets that have historically been challenging for traditional techniques.</p>
<p>The round also comes just months after Chai Discovery announced a $70 million Series A and revealed Chai 2, the first zero-shot generative platform that achieves double digit experimental success rates in de novo antibody design – a 100-fold improvement over previous computational methods.</p>
<p>“We’re standing on the precipice of a new era for the biopharmaceutical industry,” said Josh Meier, co-founder and CEO of Chai Discovery. “We’re in awe of the rate of progress on the models – what looked like five-year problems just months ago are now getting solved in weeks. 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. 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.”</p>
<p>The fundraise was co-led by Oak HC/FT and General Catalyst, with participation from Thrive Capital, OpenAI, Dimension, Menlo Ventures, Lachy Groom, Yosemite, Neo, and SV Angel. New investors Emerson Collective and Glade Brook also joined the round.</p>
<p>“We believe biology is becoming programmable, rewiring what was once an empirical art into an engineered discipline,” said Elena Viboch, Managing Director at General Catalyst. “Chai’s team is leading this transformation – advancing the technical frontier and expanding what’s possible in therapeutics.”</p>
<p>By converting what has traditionally been a lengthy iteration cycle into a computational process, Chai can materially compress the time to first-in-human studies, tackle hard to drug and “undruggable” targets, and accelerate the overall time to commercialization.</p>
<p>“Nowhere is AI transformation more needed than in drug development – the process is slow, expensive, and imprecise,” said Annie Lamont, Co-Founder &; Managing Partner at Oak HC/FT. “It can take over a decade and cost upwards of a billion dollars to bring a medicine from bench to bedside. The Chai Discovery team is rewriting that story, fusing world-class AI and biological expertise to dramatically accelerate how medicines are discovered. We’re thrilled to support them as they push the boundaries of what’s possible in this field.”</p>
<p>The company will use the funding to accelerate research and product development, and expand commercialization efforts as they continue to execute on the vision of building a “computer-aided design suite” for molecules.</p>
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