The AI-driven drug discovery company received multiple investments to help accelerate its molecular therapeutics development process.
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Chai Discovery announced its $70 million Series A financing round led by Menlo Ventures and includes investments from its Anthology Fund, a partnership with Anthropic focused on identifying and supporting promising AI companies.

Greg Yap, partner at Menlo Ventures touched on the investment saying, “Chai is an exceptional technical team building foundation models for biology to transform drug discovery, Chai-2 demonstrates amazing progress in antibody design, and we have seen a meaningful fraction of the biotech industry already apply for Chai-2 access. At Menlo, we invest deeply in both AI foundation models and technology-enabled biology––we believe Chai can help create better medicines faster.”¹

AI-driven

Founded in 2024 by Joshua Meier, (previously with AI drug discovery firm Absci, Facebook AI, and OpenAI), Jack Dent (an ex-engineer and product leader at Stripe), and Mathew McPartlon & Jacques Boitreaud (AI Researchers), Chai Discovery has advanced AI-driven drug discovery methods and has attracted numerous new investors including Yosemite, DST Global Partners, SV Angel, Avenir, and DCVC. Along with new investors, Mikael Dolsten M.D., PhD., and former Pfizer chief scientific officer who advanced 150 molecules into clinical trials while delivering 36 approved medicines, announced he is joining Chai Discovery’s board of directors.

Dolsten touched on his decision to join the growing AI company, saying, “I’m proud to join Chai Discovery and redefine biology from science into engineering. This is going to be an incredible journey with an incredible team.”¹

Strides in advancement

Last year, following the closing of a $30 million seed round led by Thrive Capital, OpenAI, and Dimension, Chai Discovery revealed Chai-1, an open-source foundational model for molecular structure prediction. Back in July 2025, Chai’s team revealed updated advancements in AI-powered drug discovery, announcing Chai-2. Chai-2 delivers antibody design with an estimated 20% hit rate, compared to traditional lab-based methods which often scan millions to billions of antibodies to find trace amounts of hits, while computational methods offer just a .1% hit rate. Chai-2 only requires the target antigen and epitope to successfully generate binders from scratch against a variety of targets. This allocates scientists focusing on target antigen (a disease-causing protein) to employ Chai-2 to create new antibodies from scratch, that will directly target the correct area.

Mathew McPartlon, one of Chai Discovery’s co-founders, touched on the importance of Chai-2 in drug discovery, saying, “Before Chai-2, the process was not unlike searching a giant bunch of keys for the right fit for a lock but there are millions of keys. Now, it’s like having a master locksmith design exactly the right shape key, based only on your description of the lock. A company had spent more than three years and over $5m on a problem. With Chai-2, we were able to find an experimentally validated solution within two weeks.”¹

Chai expects to use the Series A funding to continue development on their Chai-1 and Chai-2 platforms, applying the funds on previously inaccessible targets, as well as helping to onboard additional partners.

Joshua Meier, CEO and co-founder of Chai Discovery, discussed the goals of Chai, saying, “Progress towards game-changing drugs and treatments is far too slow, stymied by costly trial-and-error experiments. Chai Discovery exists to push the boundaries of what's possible in this field, applying frontier AI to transform biology from science to engineering, so that breakthroughs can be designed rather than simply discovered.”¹

Sources

1. Chai Discovery Announces $70 million Series A To Transform Molecular Design Buisness Wire August 6, 2025 https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20250806670137/en/Chai-Discovery-Announces-%2470-million-Series-A-To-Transform-Molecular-Design