Finance Association, September 10 (Editor Zhao Hao) According to media reports, Chai Discovery, an artificial intelligence biotechnology startup founded nearly half a year ago, raised nearly 30 million US dollars at a valuation of 0.15 billion US dollars in the latest round of financing.

Chai's seed funding round was led by Thrive Capital, a well-known venture capital firm. Investors include today's leading global artificial intelligence company OpenAI and Dimension Capital.

According to Chai, the AI-based model developed by the company can predict the structure of biochemical molecules and reprogram their interactions, a process critical to developing new drugs.

“We want to move biology from a science to engineering,” said Joshua Meier, co-founder and CEO.

In recent years, people have been very excited about the potential of AI to accelerate drug development. Two years ago, Google DeepMind's “AlphaFold” tool shocked the scientific community with its ability to predict the structure of millions of proteins.

In June of this year, EvolutionaryScale, a leading AI research laboratory in the field of biology, launched an AI model “ESM3,” which can generate novel proteins, and received $0.142 billion in seed financing.

Meanwhile, on Monday, Chai also released its first open source molecular structure model “Chai-1,” with a technical report comparing its performance with AlphaFold and ESM3. Meier said Chai's model performed better.

“We've seen a 10% to 20% increase in the success rate on the various problems we use it to solve,” he said. “For example, compared to AlphaFold, our model performed better at tasks critical to drug development.”

Prior to founding Chai, Meier was the chief artificial intelligence officer at biotech company Absci Corp and worked as a researcher at Meta and OpenAI.

In March of this year, Meier and Stripe engineer Jack Dent co-founded the company Chai. Meier said that Chai currently has less than 10 employees, but it has attracted top talent from companies such as OpenAI, Google, and Meta.

Co-founder and president Jack Dent said Chai's first model was free, and there are no plans to commercialize its technology yet.

In 2023, venture capital institutions invested nearly $30 billion in biopharmaceutical startups, according to PitchBook data. Demis Hassabis, head of AI at Google, believes that the value of this market may exceed 100 billion dollars.

For Chai, competition comes not only from other AI startups, but also from big companies like Google. “This field is big enough to accommodate everyone,” said Thrive Capital partner Miles Grimshaw, who led the financing.

Grimshaw said, “One of the benefits of working in this field is that just getting ahead in one area is profitable enough.”