Chai Discovery Raises $70M to Expand Zero-Shot Biologics Design AI Platform
Chai Discovery, an AI drug discovery company founded in late 2024 and backed by OpenAI, has raised $70 million in new funding to expand development of its antibody and molecular design platform, Chai-2. The round brings Chai’s valuation to approximately $550 million. Investors include Menlo Ventures, DST Global Partners, Yosemite, SV Angel, Avenir, DCVC, and others. Existing investors OpenAI and Thrive Capital, Dimension, Neo, Lachy Groom, and Fred Ehrsam.
The company was founded by Joshua Meier, formerly Chief AI Officer at Absci and a researcher at OpenAI and Facebook AI; Jack Dent, previously an engineer at Stripe; and AI researchers Matthew McPartlon and Jacques Boitreaud, both with experience in AI research. The company has also recently added Mikael Dolsten, former Chief Scientific Officer at Pfizer, to its board.
Chai Discovery raised a $30 million seed round in 2024 at a $150 million valuation, led by Thrive Capital, OpenAI, and Dimension, ahead of the release of its first model, Chai-1; the latest funding follows the June launch of Chai-2, which builds on the earlier model as part of Chai’s broader effort to establish computational-first pipelines for therapeutic discovery.
Chai-2 is an all-atom generative model for de novo antibody and binder design, which the company claims achieves 16–20% hit rates across previously unaddressed targets. The model generates candidates directly from structural inputs without relying on antibody templates or multiple sequence alignments (MSAs), and supports multiple biologic formats including nanobodies and miniproteins. Chai reports that the model has resolved cases previously considered intractable, including one antibody target that had consumed over $5 million in conventional R&D, but was addressed by Chai-2 within hours and validated in the lab in under two weeks.
Chai plans to commercialize its discovery platform through partnerships with pharmaceutical companies. Access to its platform remains selective under its “Responsible Deployment” policy.
Topics: Startups & Deals
