AI is changing the way we discover and make drugs.
At Menlo Ventures, we’ve seen firsthand through our investments—including Recursion, Genesis, Vilya, and Xaira—the power of combining AI innovation with deep biological and chemistry expertise for understanding disease biology and engineering novel drug candidates.
Today, we are excited to announce our lead investment in the Series A financing for Chai Discovery, a company building foundation models for biology and drug discovery to transform how biopharma creates new therapies. Our investment in Chai includes participation from our Anthology Fund, a joint partnership with Anthropic to identify and back promising AI companies.
Introducing Chai-2: AI-Powered, Zero-Shot Antibody Design
The Chai team recently released their latest antibody generation model, Chai-2, marking a breakthrough in de novo drug design using generative AI models. Antibodies are complex proteins with clinical applications in every major therapeutic area from oncology to autoimmune and infectious diseases to rare disorders.
Antibodies have historically been produced through large scale screens in biological systems—blindly creating millions or billions of keys to hopefully find one that fits a target lock. These methods, such as immunization, directed evolution, or yeast-surface display, are time-consuming, capital-intensive, and often fail on difficult targets.
In contrast, the Chai team used the Chai-2 model to create fully de novo antibody designs for 52 different targets in just a few weeks. Remarkably, the model directly generated successful binders with a 15.5% average hit rate across all formats with at least one success for half the targets—a hundred-fold improvement over previously published methods. Chai-2 is enabling generalizable and programmable engineering of antibodies for important drug targets.
Best of all, the Chai-2 model is available today. Potential partners can reach out to Chai directly for access. We believe that Chai-2 can enable scientists working in virtually any disease area anywhere to use pioneering AI models to engineer better antibodies faster.
The Chai Team: Leaders at the Intersection of AI and Life Sciences
When we first met the Chai team, we were blown away by their depth of understanding of both AI and biology and their ability to iterate and release cutting-edge models quickly. Joshua Meier and Jack Dent have been friends since college, studying CS together at Harvard. Josh went on to OpenAI and Meta’s generative biology group before becoming Chief AI Officer at antibody developer Absci, while Jack spent several years at Stripe building out new product and engineering teams. Meanwhile, Matt McPartlon and Jacques Boitreaud were top researchers at the intersection of biology and artificial intelligence. Many of the broader founding team were running AI at top drug discovery companies.
After co-founding Chai, they released Chai-1 only a few months later, quickly matching industry-leading performance with molecular structure prediction. While recruiting leading experts on generative AI for chemistry and biology, they were able to rapidly advance their models, releasing Chai-2 ahead of schedule.
The team is continuing to push the frontiers of biological foundation models, while also building out their first massive application of novel antibody drug development.
The Future: Reimagining Drug Discovery
We believe that we are still in the early innings of unlocking the promise of AI applied to life science and drug discovery. Paired with automated technologies to synthesize and evaluate computer-generated molecules at scale, models such as Chai-2 can both greatly accelerate the pace of innovation and expand the universe of druggable targets, leading to better and more life-saving therapeutics. We’re excited to support the Chai team to play a leading role in transforming the way that drugs are engineered and discovered, and ultimately transforming biology from a scientific practice into an engineering discipline.
Greg is a partner at Menlo Ventures, where he invests in teams trying to solve major problems in life science and healthcare, with a special interest in novel therapeutic platforms, digital health, and transformative technologies. Since joining in 2017, Greg has led Menlo investments including Cartwheel, Clear Labs, Curie, Delfi,…
As a principal at Menlo Ventures, Johnny invests in biotech and life science companies with a focus on novel therapeutics and new technologies for improving medical outcomes. He has firsthand experience working at the bench on engineering new tools for the clinic. While completing his Ph.D., Johnny helped develop gene…
