Chai Discovery, a biotech startup with backing from OpenAI, announced a $130 million Series B funding round on Monday, valuing the company at $1.3 billion. The round was led by General Catalyst and Oak HC/FT. 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. This investment brings the firm’s total funding to over $225 million.
The company is part of a growing industry that sees artificial intelligence as a faster route toward drug development. In August, Menlo Ventures led Chai’s $70 million Series A round. The investor described Chai as a startup building foundation models specifically tuned for drug discovery. These models predict interactions between biochemical molecules so they can be reprogrammed for cures.
Chai states that its ambition is to build the computer-aided design suite for molecules. Last year, the startup announced its Chai 1 AI model and is now offering Chai 2, its latest model. The company reports that Chai 2 achieves significant improvements in success rates for de novo antibody design, which means building custom antibodies from scratch rather than modifying existing ones.
“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,” said Josh Meier, Chai’s co-founder and CEO, in a prepared statement.
Meier, whose background is in machine learning, previously worked in research and engineering at Facebook and, prior to that, for OpenAI. Chai Discovery was founded in 2024.