OpenAI and Thrive Capital Invest $30M in AI Drug Discovery Startup Chai Discovery

Chai Discovery, a nascent AI-driven biology startup, has secured nearly $30 million in funding from prominent investors Thrive Capital and OpenAI. Founded just six months ago, Chai aims to revolutionize drug discovery by utilizing AI to predict the structure of biochemical molecules and manipulate their interactions, a critical step in developing new medications.

Joshua Meier, the company’s co-founder and CEO, emphasized the startup’s mission to transform biology into an engineering discipline. The recent seed round, led by Thrive Capital and supported by Dimension Capital, values Chai at $150 million.

The potential of AI in drug discovery has garnered significant interest recently. Google DeepMind’s AlphaFold, which predicts protein structures, made headlines in 2022, while EvolutionaryScale’s recent $142 million seed funding showcased AI’s capability to generate novel proteins.

Chai has now introduced its first open-source model, Chai-1, alongside a technical report comparing its performance to AlphaFold and ESM3, developed by EvolutionaryScale. According to Meier, Chai-1 demonstrates a 10% to 20% improvement in success rates for tasks crucial to drug discovery, outperforming AlphaFold in several benchmarks.

Before founding Chai, Meier served as the chief AI officer at Absci Corp. and worked as a researcher at Meta Platforms Inc. and OpenAI. He co-founded Chai in March with Jack Dent, a former engineer at Stripe Inc., among others. Despite having fewer than 10 employees, Chai has attracted talent from top companies such as OpenAI, Google, and Meta.

Chai’s initial model is available for free, with no current plans to commercialize the technology. Venture capitalists invested nearly $30 billion in biopharma startups in 2023, highlighting intense competition from both emerging AI startups and major players like Google, which sees the drug discovery field as a potential $100 billion market.

Miles Grimshaw, a partner at Thrive Capital who led the investment in Chai, noted the lucrative potential of even minor improvements in this field. “The space is big enough for everyone,” he said.