MoleculeX Secures Hundreds of Millions in Series A Funding Led by XieNuo Investment and Shenzhen Capital Group to Advance AI-Driven Protein Design

Investment Circle (ID: pedaily2012) September 13th, news, AI protein design platform companyMoleculeMindHeartAnnounced the completion of Series A financing recently. The amount of this financing round reachedNumberHundred MillionYuanRMB, byXie NuoInvestment, Deep WoundInvestCo-led,SenseTimeGuoxiang Capital, Long-lastingYiInvestmentFollow-on investment, this round of financing will further accelerate the construction of AI biological infrastructure.

Founder of MoleculeMind, internationally renowned computational biologist Jinbo XuRepresentatives stated that this round of financing will be used to further expand the top-tier interdisciplinary talent team, deeply refine AI protein foundational large models, the AI protein optimization and design platform MoleculeOS, and other bioeconomy common technology platforms, accelerating the industrial implementation and commercialization process of AI protein technology. "We use AI to design super proteins that surpass natural evolution, and by building AI protein infrastructure, we transform the scientific challenge of protein design into an 'programmable' and 'predictable' engineering problem."

In addition, MoleculeMind will explore systematic optimization design for the entire R&D and production process in the bioeconomy field, ranging from protein component design to metabolic pathway design and process optimization.

To date, MoleculeMind has completed three rounds of financing in total. Previous investors include leading companies in the field of synthetic biology such as Cathay Biotech, Sequoia China, Baidu Ventures, Legend Capital, etc.

ContinuousFrom 0 to 1 Innovation，AnchorDefine IndustryDifficult ProblemR&DGlobal LeaderAI ProteinTechnology

Proteins are the core material foundation of the bioeconomy, and there is a huge demand for functional proteins in fields such as biopharmaceuticals and biomanufacturing. However, it is extremely difficult to discover proteins with ideal functions from nature. Traditional methods mostly rely on wet-lab screening, which is time-consuming, costly, and has a low success rate, severely limiting the rapid development of biopharmaceuticals and biomanufacturing.

MoleculeMind, based on globally leading AI protein technology and integrating scientific computing methods such as molecular dynamics and quantum chemistry, achieves precise optimization and design of proteins with small or even zero samples, without the need for high-throughput screening. Only a small number of wet lab validations are required to accurately obtain the desired protein, greatly enhancing the efficiency and success rate of performance optimization and de novo design for various types of proteins, including antibodies, enzymes, small proteins, and vaccines.

As one of the few companies in the AI protein field with the ability to innovate from scratch, MoleculeMind possesses globally leading technical expertise and application experience in highly valuable yet extremely challenging areas such as protein dynamic binding design. Protein dynamic binding design can address application challenges like enzyme activity optimization, offering wide-ranging industrial applications. However, due to its high complexity, there are currently no publicly available mature methods worldwide. Mainstream algorithms in the industry, such as AlphaFold, are limited to predicting static protein structures and are unable to tackle this issue. MoleculeMind's self-developed protein dynamic binding design algorithm effectively avoids the widespread false-positive problems present in current mainstream algorithms and large models, achieving leading levels of accuracy and success rates.

To date, MoleculeMind has independently developed more than ten AI protein prediction, optimization, and design algorithms with leading performance, such as NewOrigin (Darwin), the world's first industrial-grade AI protein generation large model integrating sequence, structure, function, and evolution; a complex structure prediction algorithm surpassing the accuracy of AlphaFold3; and the world's first algorithm that can be simultaneously used for protein side-chain prediction and sequence design, among others. Relevant achievements have been published multiple times in core journals such as SCIENCE and the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, earning honors such as the Frontiers Breakthrough Award at the inaugural International Congress of Basic Science. At the "Latest Advances in the 3D Human Proteome" symposium organized by the Nobel Foundation, Xu Jinbo was the only guest from mainland China.

Based on revolutionary AI protein design technology, MoleculeMind has made breakthroughs in challenging industrial issues such as enzyme activity optimization design and protein performance optimization under extreme conditions. Drawing on its understanding of the design of biological components like proteins, the company systematically optimizes key aspects of biological reaction processes, including metabolic pathways, strain construction, fermentation techniques, and scale-up processes.

In a joint industrial project with leading pharmaceutical companies to optimize their core raw material enzymes, MoleculeMind utilized AI technology to design an enzyme with extremely complex functions and a very large molecular weight. As the enzyme reached the limits of the expression system, it was highly challenging to modify using wet lab methods, and no similar successful cases had been reported globally. MoleculeMind AI-designed a novel enzyme not found in nature, reducing its molecular weight by 60% while retaining functional activity, overcoming the multi-objective optimization challenges that traditional experimental methods could not achieve.

Behind these leading technologies is a team of versatile talents with a background in AI-biology crossover and deep industry experience. Professor Xu Jinbo, the founder of MoleculeMind, is known in the industry as the "pioneer of AI protein folding." In 2016, he was the first in the world to use AI methods to solve the century-old problem of protein structure prediction. The innovative technical approach he pioneered was used by DeepMind in the development of AlphaFold, opening the curtain on AI protein structure prediction and AI protein design. In 2022, Xu Jinbo returned to China to establish MoleculeMind, attracting a group of top talents from prestigious universities such as MIT, Yale, Caltech, Tsinghua, and Peking University, as well as leading companies like WuXi AppTec, Novozymes, Meta, Amazon, Baidu, Alibaba, ByteDance, and Discovery Studio. With the advancement of this globally rare top-tier team, MoleculeMind continues to push the technological boundaries, bringing a transformative engine to the bioeconomy field.

BuildBiologyEconomyInfrastructure,CommercializationProcess Acceleration

As AI protein technology innovates and industries adopt it, MoleculeMind's commercialization continues to advance. In 2023, Cathay Biotech, a leading company in synthetic biology, made a strategic investment in MoleculeMind and integrated AI protein technology into its R&D system. Recently, Liu Xiucái, Chairman of Cathay Biotech, announced significant progress in their collaboration, stating that "in optimizing key proteins, an important enzyme protein structure designed by artificial intelligence has increased the yield of strains fivefold compared to wild-type strains."

In the broader biomanufacturing market, MoleculeMind has formed deep collaborations with leading companies in pharmaceuticals, materials, chemicals, food, agriculture, and other fields. Leveraging AI-driven protein technology, it overcomes the limitations of traditional biological methods, designs superior-performance super enzymes, and empowers the entire biomanufacturing process, including metabolic pathway design and process optimization.

In the field of innovative drugs, MoleculeMind has independently developed a cytokine pipeline based on AI protein design technology. While maintaining tumor inhibition activity, it reduces toxicity (reducing peripheral activity) by hundreds of times, and the tolerated dose in monkeys is tens of times higher than similar pipelines. In the protein vaccine design project, MoleculeMind simultaneously conducted multi-objective optimization for the stability and expression levels of the protein vaccine. Verified by animal experiments, the neutralizing antibody titer produced by the vaccine is several times higher than that of publicly patented and related large pharmaceutical companies' protein vaccines, breaking through relevant vaccine stability patents.

More notably, among these industrial projects, AI-designed proteins only take 3-4 days, requiring just a small number of wet-lab experiments for validation to obtain ideal candidate molecules. The previous time-consuming high-throughput wet-lab screening model is transitioning toward "precise design + minimal validation," driving an upgrade in the underlying model of the bioeconomy through new technologies.

To accelerate the practical application of AI protein design technology, MoleculeMind has independently developed NewOrigin (Darwin), the world’s first industrial-grade AI protein generation large model that integrates sequence, structure, function, and evolution. It can "customize" proteins with specific functions in a few hours or even minutes to meet industrial application needs, featuring high success rates, strong versatility, and low usage thresholds. At the same time, MoleculeMind has integrated the NewOrigin large model into MoleculeOS, a one-stop AI platform for protein prediction, optimization, and design. Targeting users from different backgrounds and with varying needs in the bioeconomy sector, the platform provides protein design tools and services in various forms, such as APIs, software, solutions, and technical services, lowering the application threshold of AI protein technology by building an infrastructure platform.

Currently, the bioeconomy has been listed as a strategic field by dozens of countries around the world, becoming a new focal point of international competition. The global market continues to explode, with the core biopharmaceutical and biomanufacturing markets reaching hundreds of billions of dollars each. The compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of the biopharmaceutical market exceeds 10%, while the biomanufacturing market is rapidly expanding at a CAGR of over 26%. In this global race, AI protein technology is emerging as a revolutionary force reshaping the bioeconomy landscape.

Founder and Partner of XieNuo Investment,Investment CommitteeChairman Wei XiaolinRepresented by AlphaFold-2, AI-based protein structure prediction is one of the most significant and awe-inspiring scientific advancements of this century. Professor Jinbo Xu, the founder of MoleculeMind, has made pioneering contributions in this field. The leap from protein structure prediction to de novo protein design is an even greater step forward. MoleculeMind has built an outstanding technical platform for this purpose and achieved impressive progress. Meanwhile, the MoleculeMind team is highly efficient, quick to learn, and precise in execution when it comes to commercialization. From supporting synthetic biology to large molecule drug discovery, the company has made rapid commercialization progress across multiple fields. This commercial work, in turn, accelerates the iteration and enrichment of MoleculeMind's technical platform. XieNuo Investment firmly believes in the power of science and mission. Using AI to benefit humanity and create value is a future within reach. We are honored to be partnering with such an excellent team as MoleculeMind to jointly shape the future.

DeepMedInvest in HealthGeneral Manager of Industrial Investment Department, Zhou Yi"Intelligent infrastructure is a powerful engine to accelerate the development of the synthetic biology industry. The decades of R&D and application experience accumulated by the MoleculeMind team in the AI protein field, along with their large-scale AI protein models and industrial application platforms, will solidify the underlying technological foundation for the development of the synthetic biology industry. We look forward to the integration and large-scale explosion of new AI protein technologies with the biomanufacturing industry in the next phase."

SenseTime ChinaFragrant CapitalManaging PartnerHuWith"MoleculeMind's practical achievements in AI protein optimization design demonstrate the enormous potential of generative AI in this field, which will help accelerate the transformation of synthetic biology and the pharmaceutical industry. Based on SenseTime’s comprehensive advantages in large-scale AI infrastructure and models, both parties will jointly explore broader innovative spaces for AI technology in the biological field."

LongYiCapitalPartnerSaid: "Jiuyi focuses on high-tech fields. MoleculeMind is not only a leader in AI protein design technology but also sets a benchmark for the integration of AI technology and biomanufacturing industries. The current transformation in biomanufacturing is still in its early stages, and we are delighted to collaborate with a world-class team to accelerate the arrival of the AI biomanufacturing era."