Chai Discovery cofounders Josh Meier (left) and Jack Dent<\/p>\n
Cody Pickens for Forbes<\/p>\n
L<\/p>\n
ast June, <\/strong>when AI drug discovery startup Chai Discovery was just 15 months old, it released a new model that could design antibodies. Nearly 20 pharma companies reached out to talk. \u201cIt was like we dropped a bomb on the field,\u201d Chai cofounder and president Jack Dent tells Forbes. \u201cPeople were messaging on LinkedIn at 2 a.m., saying, \u2018I am so excited I can\u2019t sleep.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n Drug discovery is one of the great promises of AI\u2014scientists and investors alike hope that models could upend the laborious process of creating new therapies. Today, a single drug typically costs well over $1 billion and takes more than 10 years. The dream is for the technology to allow drug hunters to find potential therapies faster and with more precision, as well as to come up with treatments for diseases that had previously been considered \u201cundruggable.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cWe want to raise the bar of medicines that are created,\u201d says Chai cofounder and CEO Josh Meier. \u201cIt\u2019s not just getting more medicines to patients, but better medicines.\u201d<\/p>\n Despite being up against competitors that are older and have more resources, Chai Discovery has catapulted itself to the front of the AI drug discovery race. In January, the startup\u2014newly valued at $1.3 billion\u2014announced a deal with Eli Lilly, the $1 trillion (market cap) drug behemoth best known for its weight-loss drugs, to design multiple novel therapeutics with its AI model. Now, Chai tells Forbes exclusively that it has signed another big AI drug development partnership, this time with $63 billion (2025 revenue) Pfizer. <\/p>\n Earlier this year, the San Francisco-based company also quietly deployed the next iteration of its antibody design model, called Chai-3, which it claims is vastly superior to the Chai-2 one that put it on the map. \u201cThat got the Pfizer team really excited,\u201d says Dent. The company now offers its earliest Chai-1 protein-folding model for free, which lets potential pharma company customers test drive some of its tech. Chai is in talks with more than 15 additional pharma companies, and hopes to sign more deals this year. <\/p>\n While the startup declined to disclose financial details of its agreements with Pfizer or Lilly, those deals should provide it with meaningful revenue. Other partnerships in the AI drug discovery space\u2014such as Genesis Molecular\u2019s recent deal with Incyte<\/a> or Alphabet spinoff Isomorphic\u2019s 2024 agreement with Lilly<\/a>\u2014have involved tens of millions of upfront payments with potential total deal value above $1 billion. <\/p>\n Chai, which was featured on this year\u2019s AI 50 list,<\/a> has raised more than $225 million from investors including OpenAI, General Catalyst, Menlo Ventures and Oak HC\/FT. Now the company is in talks to raise an additional $400 million at a valuation of $3.4 billion, two investors familiar with the deal told Forbes. It\u2019s still early, and the company has not yet chosen a lead investor, one of those VCs said. Chai declined to comment.<\/p>\n \u201cThe models were smoke and mirrors for a long time. We knew we had to make things literally 100 times better for it to be valuable for real drug discovery programs.\u201d\n<\/p>\n Jack Dent, Chai Discovery cofounder and president<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Investors poured $11.4 billion into AI drug discovery companies globally in 2025, more than double the $5.6 billion of the previous year, according to VC database PitchBook. So far this year, that number is $5.5 billion, putting it on track to surpass last year. Isomorphic, Alphabet\u2019s AI drug discovery spinoff, alone raised an eye-popping $2.1 billion<\/a> in May. \u201cThere has been all this hope and expectation around AI in drug discovery, and people have become a little jaded because it was hard to put your finger on anything tangible,\u201d Dent says. \u201cBut we are in a completely different universe than we were a year ago.\u201d<\/p>\n Meier, 30,<\/strong> grew up in Teaneck, N.J., in a family of doctors and started programming at the age of 8. At Harvard, he considered becoming a physician before deciding to major in chemistry and computer science. \u201cWhat I love about programming is you could scale your impact,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n He met London-born Dent, 29, on their first day of Harvard classes. Dent, who studied computer science, had spent his teenage years building apps and games with friends. \u201cI was a 14-year-old making money selling apps for 99 cents each and I was like, \u2018Omigod, I\u2019m set for life,\u2019\u201d he recalls.<\/p>\n After their graduation (both with a bachelor\u2019s and a master\u2019s) in 2018, Meier worked for OpenAI, Meta\u2019s generative biology group and AI drug discovery firm Absci. Dent went to Stripe, where he gained a reputation as one of that company\u2019s top engineers. It was an auspicious time to be working with AI. Every few months, Meier and Dent would meet up at a Portuguese restaurant in San Francisco (where Dent lived) or an ice cream spot in New York (where Meier was based) to compare notes as the rapidly evolving field exploded.<\/p>\n Google DeepMind launched its first AlphaFold protein database\u2013for which its team subsequently won the Nobel Prize in chemistry\u2013in 2021. By 2024, \u201cwe had this sense that everything in AI was about to start working big time, and the protein discovery field was lagging by a few years,\u201d Dent says. They launched Chai that March with two additional cofounders Meier had met through working in the field, Matt McPartlon (who had also worked at Absci) and Jacques Boitreaud (from the French AI drug discovery firm Aqemia). <\/p>\n Together, they believed they could build a better AI model to speed up finding therapies. \u201cHumans are just very bad at drug discovery,\u201d Meier says. \u201cIt\u2019s honestly miraculous we can make drugs at all with the tools available today.\u201d They launched their first model, Chai-1, in just a few months.<\/p>\n I think it\u2019s become very clear that they are winning the war. They are winning the commercialization war, and they are winning the model and product war.\u201d\u00a0\n<\/p>\n Annie Lamont, Oak HC\/FT managing partner and Chai investor<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Most AI drug discovery companies\u2019 deals focus on specific drugs, with big payoffs if they succeed. They also typically develop their own pipelines of therapeutics because the potential revenue from a blockbuster drug is too big to ignore. Chai took a different approach and sells access to its technology. \u201cWhen we started, people told us the only way to make money is to make your own assets and become a drug company. That\u2019s the dogma we had to challenge,\u201d Dent says. He figures that in a world where drug companies will spend hundreds of millions of dollars for one promising molecule, a software engine that could spin up scores of potential therapies quickly would be extremely valuable.<\/p>\n \u201cI think it was a brilliant insight that if you want to be the trusted one that traditional industries feel comfortable teaming up with, you cannot at the same time try to have your own little shop,\u201d says Mikael Dolsten, who retired from Pfizer as president of worldwide R&D and is now on Chai\u2019s board of directors.<\/p>\n Through its collaboration with Eli Lilly, the firm is working on accelerating the development of biologic drugs. These are therapies derived from natural sources such as proteins or cells, versus chemicals that are synthesized in a lab. Lilly chief information and digital officer Diogo Rau told Forbes in March that given the timetables for drug approval, it would be \u201cmid-2030s, if not late-2030s\u201d<\/a> before any of its AI developed medicines are on the market. \u201cIt\u2019s a big bet on the future,\u201d he said at the time. (Pfizer declined to talk with Forbes about its collaboration with Chai.)<\/p>\n Annie Lamont, managing partner of Oak HC\/FT and an honoree on the Forbes Midas List<\/a> who spent a decade looking at AI drug discovery efforts before investing in Chai, says that the company\u2019s commercialization efforts have gone faster than she\u2019d expected. \u201cI think it\u2019s become very clear that they are winning the war,\u201d she says. \u201cThey are winning the commercialization war, and they are winning the model and product war.\u201d <\/p>\n It was Chai-3<\/strong> that convinced Pfizer to sign on. The model doubles the success rate of the startup\u2019s previous model and produces antibodies that bind 100 times more tightly to their intended therapeutics targets, according to the company. In drug discovery, targets like proteins, enzymes or receptors are like locks, and therapies are similar to keys that attach to them in order to treat disease. A tighter bind means a more effective treatment. \u201cThe models were smoke and mirrors for a long time,\u201d Dent says. \u201cWe knew we had to make things literally 100 times better for it to be valuable for real drug discovery programs.\u201d<\/p>\n The Chai-3 model\u2019s higher success rate and tighter binding could be a big deal for realizing the longstanding hope that AI will transform drug discovery. \u201cTech people get excited about better, faster, cheaper, but a blockbuster drug can be $10 billion a year in revenue. Going from three years to three months is meaningful, but the bigger question is, \u2018Can you make a medicine with massive impact?\u2019\u201d says Elena Viboch, managing director at General Catalyst, which co-led last December\u2019s venture investment in Chai. We\u2019re still a ways off from seeing if that\u2019s truly possible.<\/p>\n The Chai-2 model allowed researchers to design from scratch full length monoclonal antibodies, which are increasingly important in the treatment of cancer and autoimmune diseases. The model was able to spin out antibody designs from scratch 16% of the time<\/a>, compressing months of work in a wet lab to two weeks. But even though its molecules would bind to their targets\u2014the key in drug development\u2014they didn\u2019t always do it well. That meant they still had to go through a lengthy process to improve their potency and safety, just like those discovered without the use of AI.<\/p>\n The improvements in Chai-3 bring it closer to being able to skip that process of refining molecules. The company said that in roughly half of cases, the molecules generated by Chai-3 bind to their targets as tightly as approved drugs. The founders also view this as a step towards being able to create antibodies that can bind to multiple targets at once, rather than just one, creating much more complex, precise therapies. \u201cMost antibodies are just jamming up some targets. State-of-the-art is jamming two targets,\u201d Meier says. \u201cIn the future, we will modulate targets in more powerful ways.\u201d<\/p>\n Chai\u2019s R&D team is already working on its next models. Eventually Chai could offer its drug company customers AI that can design small molecules and peptides, increasing its potential market exponentially, Dolsten says. <\/p>\n As the AI models continue to get better, the companies that build them are jockeying to sign deals with pharmaceutical companies, while the big drugmakers are testing them out. \u201cThere\u2019s a general awareness among the pharma industry now that these technologies are working,\u201d Dent says. \u201cWe\u2019re past acceptance and into the excitement part of the adoption curve.\u201d<\/p>\n With additional reporting by Rashi Shrivastava <\/p>\n MORE FROM FORBES<\/strong><\/p>\n ForbesIsomorphic Labs\u2019 $2.1 Billion Fundraise Is The Biggest Bet Yet On AI Drug DiscoveryBy Amy Feldman<\/a>ForbesThis Sam Altman-Backed $1.8 Billion Startup Bets AI Can Get Drugs Through Clinical Trials FasterBy Amy Feldman<\/a>ForbesHow Lilly Used AI To Crank Up Production Of Its Popular GLP-1sBy Amy Feldman<\/a>ForbesThis $250 Million Startup Tracks How Cancer Reacts To Treatment In Real TimeBy Amy Feldman<\/a>ForbesGene Editing Has Struggled To Go Commercial. This Nobel Laureate Has A $1 Billion Plan To Fix That.By Amy Feldman<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Chai Discovery cofounders Josh Meier (left) and Jack Dent Cody Pickens for Forbes L ast June, when AI…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":1005306,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[4316],"tags":[323,278635,278636,278631,278634,13827,105,4348,278633,278632,75424,4834,16,15],"class_list":["post-1005305","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-healthcare","tag-ai","tag-annie-lamont","tag-billion-dollar-startups","tag-chai-discovery","tag-drug-hunters","tag-general-catalyst","tag-health","tag-healthcare","tag-jack-dent","tag-josh-meier","tag-lilly","tag-pfizer","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/116693065163251356","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1005305","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1005305"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1005305\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1005306"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1005305"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1005305"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1005305"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}\n
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