AI Drug Discovery Startup Chai Discovery Becomes Unicorn After $130 Mn Funding Round

Chai Discovery Inc., an artificial intelligence startup focused on accelerating drug development, has raised $130 million in a funding round led by Oak HC/FT and General Catalyst, valuing the company at $1.3 billion.

Chai Discovery plans to use the fresh capital to expand research efforts and accelerate commercialisation.

The funding comes roughly six months after Chai Discovery unveiled Chai-2, a multimodal AI model designed to automate and speed up key stages of medical research.

“What looked like five-year problems just months ago are now getting solved in weeks,” said Chai Discovery founder and Chief Executive Officer Josh Meier. “Our latest models can design molecules that have properties we’d want from actual drugs, and tackle challenging targets that have been out of reach.”

According to the company, Chai-2 can deliver a “100-fold improvement over previous computational methods” in certain areas of drug discovery. Unlike many competing models that generate only fragments of proteins, Chai-2 is capable of designing full-length monoclonal antibodies, or mAbs, which form the basis of many modern therapies. The model can also generate nanobodies and miniproteins, expanding its potential therapeutic reach.

Drug development hinges on multiple factors, including binding affinity, manufacturability, safety and stability. Chai Discovery says its AI evaluates all these dimensions simultaneously and with high precision.

The company noted that the model “reasons about structures at sub-angstrom scale,” enabling fine-grained molecular design. In internal tests, 89% of the antibodies designed by Chai-2 showed either no issues or only a single issue across four key drug viability criteria.

The round included participation from more than half a dozen investors, including OpenAI Group PBC and Thrive Capital, one of OpenAI’s largest backers.