Chai Discovery, the AI company that predicts and reprograms the interactions between biochemical molecules to accelerate life-changing therapeutics, announced its $70 million Series A financing round.

The fundraise was led by Menlo Ventures, including investment from their Anthology Fund, a joint partnership with Anthropic to identify and back promising AI companies, with participation from new investors Yosemite, DST Global Partners, SV Angel, Avenir, DCVC, and others. It also included existing investors Thrive Capital, OpenAI, Dimension, Neo, Lachy Groom, and Fred Ehrsam, among others.

“Progress towards game-changing drugs and treatments is far too slow, stymied by costly trial-and-error experiments,” said Joshua Meier, CEO and co-founder. “Chai Discovery exists to push the boundaries of what's possible in this field, applying frontier AI to transform biology from science to engineering, so that breakthroughs can be designed rather than simply discovered.”

Chai was founded in 2024 by Joshua Meier (ex AI drug discovery firm Absci; Facebook AI; OpenAI), Jack Dent (ex Eng and Product leader at Stripe), and AI researchers Matthew McPartlon and Jacques Boitreaud.

Mikael Dolsten, M.D., PhD., the former Pfizer Chief Scientific Officer responsible for advancing 150 molecules into clinical trials and delivering 36 approved medicines, is joining the company’s board of directors.

“I’m proud to join Chai Discovery and redefine biology from science into engineering,” Dr. Dolsten said. “This is going to be an incredible journey with an incredible team.”

Last year, the company closed a $30 million seed round led by Thrive Capital, OpenAI, and Dimension. Soon after, they released Chai-1, an open-source foundation model for molecular structure prediction that performs at the state-of-the-art