Chai Discovery Raises $130 Million

SAN FRANCISCO &&num;8212&semi; Chai Discovery, the AI company that predicts and reprograms the interactions between biochemical molecules, has raised &dollar;130 million Series B financing round co-led by Oak HC/FT and General Catalyst&period;&NewLine;The Series B round brings Chai’s total funding to more than &dollar;225 million and values the company at &dollar;1&period;3 billion&period; As part of the funding, Annie Lamont from Oak HC/FT and Hemant Taneja from General Catalyst will be joining the board&period;&NewLine;The news comes on the heels of Chai’s most recent announcement1, where the company showed their latest models can now design molecules with important &OpenCurlyDoubleQuote;developability” properties and tackle &OpenCurlyDoubleQuote;hard-to-drug” targets that have historically been challenging for traditional techniques&period;&NewLine;The round also comes just months after Chai Discovery announced a &dollar;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&period;&NewLine;&OpenCurlyDoubleQuote;We’re standing on the precipice of a new era for the biopharmaceutical industry,” said Josh Meier, co-founder and CEO of Chai Discovery&period; &OpenCurlyDoubleQuote;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&period; 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&period; 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&period;”&NewLine;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&period; New investors Emerson Collective and Glade Brook also joined the round&period;&NewLine;&OpenCurlyDoubleQuote;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&period; &OpenCurlyDoubleQuote;Chai’s team is leading this transformation – advancing the technical frontier and expanding what’s possible in therapeutics&period;”&NewLine;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 &OpenCurlyDoubleQuote;undruggable” targets, and accelerate the overall time to commercialization&period;&NewLine;&OpenCurlyDoubleQuote;Nowhere is AI transformation more needed than in drug development – the process is slow, expensive, and imprecise,” said Annie Lamont, Co-Founder &amp&semi; Managing Partner at Oak HC/FT&period; &OpenCurlyDoubleQuote;It can take over a decade and cost upwards of a billion dollars to bring a medicine from bench to bedside&period; The Chai Discovery team is rewriting that story, fusing world-class AI and biological expertise to dramatically accelerate how medicines are discovered&period; We’re thrilled to support them as they push the boundaries of what’s possible in this field&period;”&NewLine;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 &OpenCurlyDoubleQuote;computer-aided design suite” for molecules&period;&NewLine;&nbsp&semi;&NewLine;

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