Chai Discovery Secures $130M in Series B to Support Innovation in AI-Powered Antibody Design
Chai Discovery has closed a $130 million Series B financing round, aimed at accelerating its research and product development efforts while expanding its commercialization roadmap toward building a computer-aided molecular design suite.
The round was led by General Catalyst and Oak HC/FT, with participation from OpenAI, Dimension, Thrive Capital, Neo, Yosemite, Lachy Groom, SV Angel, and other investors.
The biotech company develops advanced AI models for de novo antibody design through its Chai-2 platform, which it describes as the first zero-shot generative system to achieve double-digit experimental success rates in this domain.
Unveiled in June via a bioRxiv preprint, Chai-2 demonstrated a 16% success rate in fully de novo antibody and nanobody design across 52 diverse targets, completing the workflow from AI design to wet-lab validation in under two weeks.
“We actually tested as few as 20 molecules for each one of those targets. Most papers in this space were putting out data on 2 or 3 molecules,” said Josh Meier, Co-founder and CEO of Chai Discovery. “Given the really high success rates of the models, we’ve actually now been able to test this at a really large scale.”
In a subsequent update, the company highlighted its expansion into designing full-length therapeutic monoclonal antibodies, reporting that over 86% of the designs showed strong developability profiles comparable to approved therapeutics, with experimentally resolved structures matching in silico predictions.
Following this round, Chai Discovery’s total funding has surpassed $255 million, reaching a valuation of $1.3 billion, with proceeds dedicated to advancing its AI models and building a comprehensive molecular design platform.
