Biotech startup Chai Discovery, which is committed to applying artificial intelligence to drug development, announced on Monday that it has successfully completed a $130 million Series B funding round, with the company's valuation surging to $1.3 billion.
The funding was led by General Catalyst and Oak HC/FT, reinforcing Chai Discovery's leading position in the rapidly growing AI-driven drug discovery field. Other prominent investors also participated actively, including Menlo Ventures, OpenAI, Dimension, Thrive Capital, Neo, Yosemite Venture Fund, Lachy Groom, SV Angel, as well as new additions Glade Brook and Emerson Collective.
With this funding, Chai Discovery's total funding has exceeded $225 million. Notably, the company completed a $70 million Series A funding round led by Menlo Ventures in August of this year.
Chai Discovery was founded in 2024, with its core mission to build a foundational model for drug discovery, aiming to develop a "molecular computer-aided design suite." These models are specifically designed to accurately predict and reprogram interactions between biochemical molecules, thereby accelerating the development of treatment methods.
The company's latest release, the Chai2 AI model, is another major breakthrough following Chai1. Chai Discovery emphasizes that Chai2 has achieved significant improvements in success rates for de novo antibody design (i.e., building custom antibodies from scratch) compared to traditional methods.
Josh Meier, co-founder and CEO of Chai, stated in a statement: "Our latest model is capable of designing molecules with the characteristics we expect from actual drugs and solving challenging targets that were previously unattainable." With a background in machine learning, Meier worked in research and engineering at Facebook and previously at OpenAI.
