OpenAI-backed biotech company Chai Discovery raises $130M Series B at $1.3B valuation

Chai Discovery, an OpenAI-backed biotech startup, announced a $130 million Series B round on Monday at a valuation of $1.3 billion.

The round was led by General Catalyst and Oak HC/FT, the company said. Other participants include Menlo Ventures, OpenAI, Dimension, Thrive Capital, Neo, Yosemite Venture Fund, Lachy Groom, SV Angel and new investors Glade Brook and Emerson Collective. The company’s total funding now stands at over $225 million.

The company is part of a growing industry that sees AI as a faster path to drug development. In August, Menlo Ventures announced it was leading Chai’s $70 million Series A round. The investor described Chai as a startup that was building basic models suitable for drug discovery, particularly for predicting interactions between biochemical molecules so they can be reprogrammed for cures.

Chai says his ambition is to “build the ‘computer-aided design suite’ for molecules.” Last year, the startup announced the Chai 1 AI model and now offers Chai 2, its latest model. The company claims that Chai 2 achieves significant improvements in success rates compared to other methods of de novo antibody design, which means creating custom antibodies from scratch, without modifying existing ones.

“Our latest models can design molecules with properties we would expect from real drugs and tackle difficult targets that have been out of reach,” said Josh Meier, co-founder and CEO of Chai in a prepared statement.

Previously, Meier, whose background is in machine learning, worked in research and engineering at Facebook and, before that, worked for OpenAI, according to his LinkedIn. Chai Discovery was founded in 2024, the profile notes.