TLDR: Chai Discovery, an AI therapeutics company, has successfully raised $70 million in a Series A funding round led by Menlo Ventures, bringing its total funding to over $100 million. The capital will accelerate its AI-driven drug development platform, particularly its breakthrough Chai-2 model, which boasts a near-20% hit rate for de novo antibody design, significantly outperforming traditional methods.
San Francisco-based Chai Discovery, a pioneering AI therapeutics company, announced today it has secured $70 million in a Series A financing round, spearheaded by Menlo Ventures. This latest investment elevates the company’s total funding to over $100 million, following a $30 million seed round closed last year. The Series A round saw participation from Menlo Ventures’ Anthology Fund, a joint initiative with Anthropic focused on identifying promising AI companies, alongside new investors Yosemite, DST Global Partners, SV Angel, Avenir, and DCVC. Existing backers, including Thrive Capital, OpenAI, Dimension, Neo, Lachy Groom, and Fred Ehrsam, also contributed to the round.
Founded in 2024 by Joshua Meier (CEO and co-founder, formerly of Absci, Facebook AI, and OpenAI), Jack Dent (ex-Stripe), and AI researchers Matthew McPartlon and Jacques Boitreaud, Chai Discovery aims to fundamentally transform drug development. The company’s core mission is to predict and reprogram the interactions between biochemical molecules, thereby accelerating the creation of life-changing therapeutics.
Central to Chai Discovery’s innovative approach is its flagship AI model, Chai-2, which has achieved a significant breakthrough in fully de novo antibody design. This model boasts an impressive near-20% hit rate for generating successful binders from scratch, a dramatic improvement compared to the previous computational state-of-the-art of 0.1% and the millions to billions of antibodies often screened in traditional lab-based methods. Chai-2 can design novel, epitope-specific binders across diverse modalities by simply inputting the target antigen and epitope. Matthew McPartlon, a co-founder, likened the process to ‘having a master locksmith design exactly the right shape key, based only on your description of the lock,’ in contrast to ‘searching a giant bunch of keys for the right fit for a lock.’
Joshua Meier, CEO and co-founder, emphasized the urgency of their mission, stating, ‘Progress towards game-changing drugs and treatments is far too slow, stymied by costly trial-and-error experiments. 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.’ This AI-driven paradigm shift is crucial given the inefficiencies of traditional drug development, which can take 10-15 years, cost $1 billion to $2.6 billion per drug, and face a 90% failure rate between Phase I trials and regulatory approval.
In a strategic move to bolster its leadership, Chai Discovery announced that Mikael Dolsten, M.D., PhD., the former Chief Scientific Officer at Pfizer, will join its board of directors. Dolsten’s extensive experience includes advancing 150 molecules into clinical trials and delivering 36 approved medicines.
The company’s previous model, Chai-1, released in 2024, was an open-source foundation model for molecular structure prediction that quickly became a leader in its category, enabling precise predictions of molecular shapes and interactions. The success of Chai-2 builds upon this foundation, promising to slash drug development timelines and enable the pursuit of previously inaccessible drug targets.
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Greg Yap, Partner at Menlo Ventures, expressed strong confidence in the company, stating, ‘Chai is an exceptional technical team building foundation models for biology to transform drug discovery. 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.’
