Chemical.AI recently announced the closing of nearly $15 million Series A+ funding led by Source Code Capital, with participation from Sequoia China, FreesFund and Hofon Capital, to support the construction and improvement of automated synthesis platform and new marketing penetration. Previously, the company had completed an angel round of funding in 2019 from FreesFund, and the Series A financing led by Sequoia China Seed Fund and followed by Nest.Bio Ventures and FreesFund in early 2021.
Chemical.AI, an R&D technology company empowering chemistry with AI that avails artificial intelligence technology, big data and machine learning to develop toolkit that dramatically improves the efficiency of chemical research, and is committed to building an intelligent planning platform for compounds.
The founder and the team of Chemical.AI have been working in the field of cheminformatics for more than ten years, with abundant R&D experience and a large amount of accumulated data in chemical industry, and the founder is a pioneer in AI-driven chemical synthesis industry in China.
“Thanks to the early involvement and strong technology accumulation, our team has made very significant progress in intelligent synthesis and has broad development prospects, which is the main reason why we received this round of financing. It will enable us to improve our automated synthesis platform and experimental data collection, and become an AI platform-based company serving synthetic R&D companies, thus helping the whole molecular synthesis industry to advance from the ‘manual era’ to the ‘intelligent stage’.” said Dr.Ning XIA, CEO and founder of Chemical.AI.
Although automated equipment is gradually being promoted in the field of chemical synthesis, computer-driven synthesis process is still a big problem, and the seamless integration of hardware, software and data is the core challenge. Professor E.J. Corey identified the rules of retrosynthesis in the 1960s. However, it was not until late 2019 that the US MIT News website issued an article, stating robotic platforms can automatically produce chemical molecules with the help of AI. This demonstrates how difficult it is to achieve automated synthesis.
Chemical.AI team has been committed into the chemical synthesis for many years and has made remarkable progress in retrosynthesis.
We promote valuable data integration and reaction prediction with self-developed algorithms, and continuously improving the AI automated synthesis platform, which in turn empowers the team's R&D staff. At the same time, we have established long-term partnerships with many large pharmaceutical companies and CRO giants around the world.
“Source Code Capital continues to be optimistic about the potential of data science in all aspects of drug R&D. Under the background of industrial division of labor, chemical synthesis has become one of the most standardized aspects of drug discovery and development, which has been initially digitized. Since 2005, there are teams have been trying to tackle these challenges continuously. Until 2018, chemical synthesis algorithm is gradually realized with the support of new AI technology. Chemical.AI team has persisted in this field for more than a decade, accumulating abundant experience in data and algorithms and the platform they provide has been recognized by leading Pharmas and CROs in this field. Next, Chemical.AI will realize the closed loop workflow in chemical synthesis by combining automation and algorithms. We expect Chemical.AI to continue to lead the world in this area and believe it will provide vital infrastructure for a new paradigm of data-driven R&D for small molecule drug in the future.”, said Mr. Runze Chen from Source Code Capital, the lead investor of this round.
