Manas AI Raises $26M Seed Extension and Appoints Ujjwal Singh as CTO and Co-Founder

Manas AI, a New York–based company developing AI-native drug discovery and development technologies, has closed a $26 million seed extension round and named Ujjwal Singh as Co-Founder and Chief Technology Officer.

Manas AI was founded through the collaboration of Siddhartha Mukherjee, the Pulitzer Prize–winning oncologist and author of "The Emperor of All Maladies", and Reid Hoffman, co-founder of LinkedIn and longtime technology investor.

The two combined their backgrounds in biomedical science and large-scale technology to create an AI-driven drug discovery company focused on designing and screening molecules for diseases such as cancer. Mukherjee leads the company as CEO, while Hoffman supports its development, with Microsoft contributing its Azure cloud infrastructure to power Manas AI’s computational efforts.

The recent financing follows an earlier $24.6 million seed round announced in January 2025, backed by General Catalyst and Reid Hoffman. Participants in the extension include The General Partnership, Wisdom Ventures, Blitzscaling Ventures, Westbound Equity Partners, Mosaic Ventures, and individual investors.

The new funding will support development of the company’s neuro-symbolic, science-based foundational models for drug discovery and the advancement of its therapeutic programs. It will also finance team expansion, with Ujjwal Singh now leading technology strategy. Singh previously served as Chief Technology and Product Officer at Multiverse, Head of Workplace at Meta, and Senior Director of Engineering at Google.

Manas AI describes itself as a full-stack, AI-native biopharmaceutical company that integrates artificial intelligence into every stage of the drug discovery and development pipeline. Its platform combines large-scale foundational models with domain knowledge from chemistry, physics, and biology, supporting an end-to-end process from target identification through to clinical development. The company emphasizes that its ultimate product is medicines, not tools, applying AI directly to bring therapies to market.

The platform spans multiple therapeutic modalities, including antibodies, nanobodies, small molecules, siRNAs, and combinatorial approaches. It employs neuro-symbolic, physics-based deep learning models for de novo drug generation and optimization, alongside agent-based workflows for target discovery. Manas AI also integrates human expertise into its workflows and is developing an international ecosystem of partners and clinical trial networks designed to increase efficiency and safety in advancing new therapies.

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Topic: Biotech Ventures