Latest news with #ChaiDiscovery
Yahoo
4 days ago
- Business
- Yahoo
Chai Discovery Announces $70 million Series A To Transform Molecular Design
Fundraise follows foundation model breakthrough in fully de novo antibody design with the Chai-2 series of models Menlo Ventures-led round takes total funding to $100M Former Pfizer Chief Scientific Officer Mikael Dolsten, M.D., PhD., joins board SAN FRANCISCO, August 06, 2025--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Chai Discovery, the AI company that predicts and reprograms the interactions between biochemical molecules to accelerate life-changing therapeutics, today announced its $70 million Series A financing round. The fundraise was led by Menlo Ventures, including investment from their Anthology Fund, a joint partnership with Anthropic to identify and back promising AI companies, with participation from new investors Yosemite, DST Global Partners, SV Angel, Avenir, DCVC, and others. It also included existing investors Thrive Capital, OpenAI, Dimension, Neo, Lachy Groom, and Fred Ehrsam, among others. "Progress towards game-changing drugs and treatments is far too slow, stymied by costly trial-and-error experiments," said Joshua Meier, CEO and co-founder. "Chai Discovery exists to push the boundaries of what's possible in this field, applying frontier AI to transform biology from science to engineering, so that breakthroughs can be designed rather than simply discovered." Chai was founded in 2024 by Joshua Meier (ex AI drug discovery firm Absci; Facebook AI; OpenAI), Jack Dent (ex Eng and Product leader at Stripe), and AI researchers Matthew McPartlon and Jacques Boitreaud. Mikael Dolsten M.D., PhD., the former Pfizer Chief Scientific Officer responsible for advancing 150 molecules into clinical trials and delivering 36 approved medicines, is joining the company's board of directors. "I'm proud to join Chai Discovery and redefine biology from science into engineering," Dr. Dolsten said. "This is going to be an incredible journey with an incredible team." Last year, the company closed a $30 million seed round led by Thrive Capital, OpenAI, and Dimension. Soon after, they released Chai-1, an open-source foundation model for molecular structure prediction that performs at the state-of-the-art Last month, the team unveiled a further leap in AI-driven drug discovery with their Chai‑2 breakthrough, delivering fully de novo antibody design with a near-20% hit rate. By contrast, traditional lab based methods often have to screen millions to billions of antibodies to find hits, and the previous state of the art for computational methods was only 0.1%. When inputting only the target antigen and epitope, Chai‑2 can generate successful binders from scratch against a wide variety of targets. This means that scientists working on a target antigen, a specific disease-causing protein such as a virus or type of cancer, can use Chai-2 to design, from scratch, completely new antibodies that can hit the right spot. "Before Chai-2, the process was not unlike searching a giant bunch of keys for the right fit for a lock—but there are millions of keys," said Matthew McPartlon, co-founder. "Now, it's like having a master locksmith design exactly the right shape key, based only on your description of the lock. A company had spent more than three years and over $5m on a problem. With Chai-2, we were able to find an experimentally validated solution within two weeks." The funding will be used to further develop the Chai platform, applying it toward previously inaccessible targets, and onboarding select partners. "Chai is an exceptional technical team building foundation models for biology to transform drug discovery," said Greg Yap, Partner at Menlo Ventures. "Chai-2 demonstrates amazing progress in antibody design, and we have seen a meaningful fraction of the biotech industry already apply for Chai-2 access. At Menlo, we invest deeply in both AI foundation models and technology-enabled biology–we believe Chai can help create better medicines faster." For more information on Chai Discovery and its platform, visit About Chai Discovery Chai Discovery builds frontier artificial intelligence to predict and reprogram the interactions between biochemical molecules, the fundamental building blocks of life. Its mission is to transform biology from science into engineering. The team hails from pioneering research and applied AI companies such as OpenAI, Meta FAIR, Stripe, and Google X, and is backed by top investors including OpenAI, Thrive Capital, Menlo Ventures and Dimension. View source version on Contacts press@ Error in retrieving data Sign in to access your portfolio Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data
Business Wire
4 days ago
- Business
- Business Wire
Chai Discovery Announces $70 million Series A To Transform Molecular Design
SAN FRANCISCO--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Chai Discovery, the AI company that predicts and reprograms the interactions between biochemical molecules to accelerate life-changing therapeutics, today announced its $70 million Series A financing round. The fundraise was led by Menlo Ventures, including investment from their Anthology Fund, a joint partnership with Anthropic to identify and back promising AI companies, with participation from new investors Yosemite, DST Global Partners, SV Angel, Avenir, DCVC, and others. It also included existing investors Thrive Capital, OpenAI, Dimension, Neo, Lachy Groom, and Fred Ehrsam, among others. 'Progress towards game-changing drugs and treatments is far too slow, stymied by costly trial-and-error experiments,' said Joshua Meier, CEO and co-founder. 'Chai Discovery exists to push the boundaries of what's possible in this field, applying frontier AI to transform biology from science to engineering, so that breakthroughs can be designed rather than simply discovered.' Chai was founded in 2024 by Joshua Meier (ex AI drug discovery firm Absci; Facebook AI; OpenAI), Jack Dent (ex Eng and Product leader at Stripe), and AI researchers Matthew McPartlon and Jacques Boitreaud. Mikael Dolsten M.D., PhD., the former Pfizer Chief Scientific Officer responsible for advancing 150 molecules into clinical trials and delivering 36 approved medicines, is joining the company's board of directors. 'I'm proud to join Chai Discovery and redefine biology from science into engineering,' Dr. Dolsten said. 'This is going to be an incredible journey with an incredible team.' Last year, the company closed a $30 million seed round led by Thrive Capital, OpenAI, and Dimension. Soon after, they released Chai-1, an open-source foundation model for molecular structure prediction that performs at the state-of-the-art Last month, the team unveiled a further leap in AI-driven drug discovery with their Chai‑2 breakthrough, delivering fully de novo antibody design with a near-20% hit rate. By contrast, traditional lab based methods often have to screen millions to billions of antibodies to find hits, and the previous state of the art for computational methods was only 0.1%. When inputting only the target antigen and epitope, Chai‑2 can generate successful binders from scratch against a wide variety of targets. This means that scientists working on a target antigen, a specific disease-causing protein such as a virus or type of cancer, can use Chai-2 to design, from scratch, completely new antibodies that can hit the right spot. 'Before Chai-2, the process was not unlike searching a giant bunch of keys for the right fit for a lock—but there are millions of keys,' said Matthew McPartlon, co-founder. 'Now, it's like having a master locksmith design exactly the right shape key, based only on your description of the lock. A company had spent more than three years and over $5m on a problem. With Chai-2, we were able to find an experimentally validated solution within two weeks.' The funding will be used to further develop the Chai platform, applying it toward previously inaccessible targets, and onboarding select partners. 'Chai is an exceptional technical team building foundation models for biology to transform drug discovery,' said Greg Yap, Partner at Menlo Ventures. 'Chai-2 demonstrates amazing progress in antibody design, and we have seen a meaningful fraction of the biotech industry already apply for Chai-2 access. At Menlo, we invest deeply in both AI foundation models and technology-enabled biology–we believe Chai can help create better medicines faster.' For more information on Chai Discovery and its platform, visit Chai Discovery builds frontier artificial intelligence to predict and reprogram the interactions between biochemical molecules, the fundamental building blocks of life. Its mission is to transform biology from science into engineering. The team hails from pioneering research and applied AI companies such as OpenAI, Meta FAIR, Stripe, and Google X, and is backed by top investors including OpenAI, Thrive Capital, Menlo Ventures and Dimension.
Yahoo
30-06-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Chai Discovery Unveils Chai-2 Breakthrough, Achieving Fully De Novo Antibody Design With AI
SAN FRANCISCO, June 30, 2025--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Chai Discovery, which builds frontier artificial intelligence to predict and reprogram the interactions between biochemical molecules, today announced a breakthrough in the de novo design of antibodies. The company's latest model, Chai-2, demonstrates a remarkable antibody design hit rate close to 20%. Prompted with just the target and epitope, Chai-2 successfully designs all complementarity-determining regions (CDRs) entirely from scratch—a breakthrough in a field where traditional techniques, including those based on AI, consistently show hit rates below 0.1%. Extensive lab validation of roughly 50 antibody targets showed that almost half yielded validated hits, when testing fewer than 20 designs experimentally for each. Designed antibodies exhibited desirable drug-like properties, such as nanomolar-range affinities, specificity for intended targets, and strong developability profiles, enabling rapid translation into therapeutic applications. Chai-2 also produced validated binders for 5 out of 5 miniprotein targets, with hit rates several times higher than previous state-of-the-art. "I've been impressed by the scale of Chai Discovery's ambition since our early conversations a while ago—when such progress scarcely seemed possible—and it's incredible to see this breakthrough come so quickly," said Mikael Dolsten, who served as Chief Scientific Officer of Pfizer for over 15 years. "Chai-2 holds high potential for de novo design of medicines with short turnaround times." Antibodies are essential to our immune systems and critical to biomedical research and therapeutic discovery. However, traditional methods of developing antibodies—like immunization, directed evolution, or yeast-surface display—can be slow, expensive, and imprecise. Computational approaches offer a faster, more precise alternative, but until now have struggled with low success rates and often required significant and expensive experimental screening to refine initial designs. Chai-2 is the first AI system capable of reliably generating novel antibodies from scratch, based solely on target epitopes, without any need for extensive lab screening or optimization rounds. It supports a wide range of formats and has already shown robust success across both nanobodies (VHHs) and VH-VL format. Researchers can go from in silico generation to lab validation in under two weeks, enabling rapid iteration and accelerated development timelines. "Chai-2 is like Photoshop for proteins—it enables precise, rapid, and intuitive creation of biologic therapeutics, which can enable previously intractable targets," said Joshua Meier, co-founder at Chai. "We built Chai to enable outcomes that were previously impossible, and we're thrilled by these results. This marks a turning point in science." In one case, Chai-2 solved an antibody challenge that had previously consumed over $5 million in traditional R&D spend—in just a few hours. The result was validated in the lab within two weeks. With the biopharma industry under pressure from patent cliffs, cost-cutting mandates, and the growing need to pursue differentiated R&D, Chai offers a platform to not only improve productivity but to unlock entirely new therapeutic spaces. Chai Discovery also announced that they will be opening early access to Chai-2 to select partners. For more details, visit or read ABOUT CHAI DISCOVERY Chai Discovery builds frontier artificial intelligence to predict and reprogram the interactions between biochemical molecules, the fundamental building blocks of life. Its mission is to transform biology from science into engineering. The team hails from pioneering research and applied AI companies such as OpenAI, Meta FAIR, Stripe, and Google X, and is backed by top investors including OpenAI, Thrive Capital and Dimension. View source version on Contacts press@
Business Wire
30-06-2025
- Business
- Business Wire
Chai Discovery Unveils Chai-2 Breakthrough, Achieving Fully De Novo Antibody Design With AI
SAN FRANCISCO--(BUSINESS WIRE)-- Chai Discovery, which builds frontier artificial intelligence to predict and reprogram the interactions between biochemical molecules, today announced a breakthrough in the de novo design of antibodies. The company's latest model, Chai-2, demonstrates a remarkable antibody design hit rate close to 20%. Prompted with just the target and epitope, Chai-2 successfully designs all complementarity-determining regions (CDRs) entirely from scratch—a breakthrough in a field where traditional techniques, including those based on AI, consistently show hit rates below 0.1%. Extensive lab validation of roughly 50 antibody targets showed that almost half yielded validated hits, when testing fewer than 20 designs experimentally for each. Designed antibodies exhibited desirable drug-like properties, such as nanomolar-range affinities, specificity for intended targets, and strong developability profiles, enabling rapid translation into therapeutic applications. Chai-2 also produced validated binders for 5 out of 5 miniprotein targets, with hit rates several times higher than previous state-of-the-art. 'I've been impressed by the scale of Chai Discovery's ambition since our early conversations a while ago—when such progress scarcely seemed possible—and it's incredible to see this breakthrough come so quickly,' said Mikael Dolsten, who served as Chief Scientific Officer of Pfizer for over 15 years. 'Chai-2 holds high potential for de novo design of medicines with short turnaround times.' Antibodies are essential to our immune systems and critical to biomedical research and therapeutic discovery. However, traditional methods of developing antibodies—like immunization, directed evolution, or yeast-surface display—can be slow, expensive, and imprecise. Computational approaches offer a faster, more precise alternative, but until now have struggled with low success rates and often required significant and expensive experimental screening to refine initial designs. Chai-2 is the first AI system capable of reliably generating novel antibodies from scratch, based solely on target epitopes, without any need for extensive lab screening or optimization rounds. It supports a wide range of formats and has already shown robust success across both nanobodies (VHHs) and VH-VL format. Researchers can go from in silico generation to lab validation in under two weeks, enabling rapid iteration and accelerated development timelines. 'Chai-2 is like Photoshop for proteins—it enables precise, rapid, and intuitive creation of biologic therapeutics, which can enable previously intractable targets,' said Joshua Meier, co-founder at Chai. 'We built Chai to enable outcomes that were previously impossible, and we're thrilled by these results. This marks a turning point in science.' In one case, Chai-2 solved an antibody challenge that had previously consumed over $5 million in traditional R&D spend—in just a few hours. The result was validated in the lab within two weeks. With the biopharma industry under pressure from patent cliffs, cost-cutting mandates, and the growing need to pursue differentiated R&D, Chai offers a platform to not only improve productivity but to unlock entirely new therapeutic spaces. Chai Discovery also announced that they will be opening early access to Chai-2 to select partners. For more details, visit or read Chai Discovery builds frontier artificial intelligence to predict and reprogram the interactions between biochemical molecules, the fundamental building blocks of life. Its mission is to transform biology from science into engineering. The team hails from pioneering research and applied AI companies such as OpenAI, Meta FAIR, Stripe, and Google X, and is backed by top investors including OpenAI, Thrive Capital and Dimension.
