MoleculeX Completes Series A Funding Round to Advance World-Class AI Protein Platform Driving Transformation in Bio-Industry

    In the wave of intelligent upgrading in the bioeconomy, industry-leadingAI Protein Design Platform Company MoleculeMind Announces Completion of Series A Financing. This round of financing amounts to hundreds of millions of RMB, led jointly by Zenno Investment and Shenzhen Capital Group, with participation from SenseTime Guoxiang Capital and Jiuyi Investment.As an AI biologics design platform company with industry benchmark status, MoleculeMind's current round of financing will further accelerate the construction of AI bio-infrastructure.

MoleculeMind founder and internationally renowned computational biologist Jinbo Xu stated that this round of financing will be used to further expand the top-tier interdisciplinary talent team, deeply enhance bioeconomy common technology platforms such as the AI protein foundational large model and the AI protein optimization design platform MoleculeOS, and accelerate 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."

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

As of now, MoleculeMind has completed 3 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.

Proteins are the core material foundation of the bioeconomy. The fields of biopharmaceuticals and biomanufacturing have a huge demand for functional proteins, but discovering proteins with ideal functions from nature is extremely challenging. Traditional methods mostly rely on wet-lab screening, which is time-consuming, costly, and has a low success rate, severely restricting 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 broad 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 static protein structure prediction 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-level AI protein generation large model integrating sequence, structure, function, and evolution; complex structure prediction algorithms surpassing the accuracy of AlphaFold 3; and the world’s first algorithm that can be simultaneously used for protein side-chain prediction and sequence design, among others. Related achievements have been published multiple times in core journals such as SCIENCE and the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, earning honors like 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 their understanding of the design of biological components like proteins, they systematically optimize critical aspects of biological reaction processes, including metabolic pathways, strain construction, fermentation techniques, and scaling-up procedures.

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 extremely 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 composite talents with AI-bio interdisciplinary backgrounds and deep industry experience.Professor Xu Jinbo, Founder of MoleculeMindKnown in the industry as "Founder of AI Protein Folding" known as the first in the world to use AI methods to break through the century-old challenge of protein structure prediction in 2016. The innovative technical approach he pioneered was utilized by DeepMind in the development of AlphaFold, ushering in a new era of AI-driven protein structure prediction and AI-based protein design. In 2022, Jinbo Xu returned to China and founded MoleculeMind, attracting a group of top talents from prestigious institutions such as MIT, Yale, Caltech, Tsinghua, Peking University, and 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 technological boundaries, bringing transformative engines to the bioeconomy field.

As AI protein technology innovates and lands in the industry, MoleculeMind's commercialization pace continues to advance. In 2023, Cathay Biotech, a leading company in synthetic biology, strategically invested in MoleculeMind and integrated AI protein technology into its R&D system. Recently, Liu Xiucái, Chairman of Cathay Biotech, announced significant progress in the collaboration between the two parties. In optimizing key proteins, "compared with wild strains, an important enzyme protein structure designed by artificial intelligence has increased the strain yield by five times."

In the broader biomanufacturing market, MoleculeMind has reached deep collaborations with leading companies in the pharmaceuticals, materials, chemicals, food, agriculture and other fields.Using AI protein technology to break through the limitations of traditional biological methods, designing superior super enzymes, and empowering the entire process of biomanufacturing 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 suppression 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 optimizes multiple objectives such as the stability and expression levels of the protein vaccine. Animal experiments have verified that the neutralizing antibody titer produced by the vaccine is several times higher than those of publicly patented and related large pharmaceutical companies' protein vaccines, breaking through relevant vaccine stability patents.

More noteworthy is that, among these industrial projects,AI Designs Proteins in Just 3-4 Days, requiring only a small amount of wet-lab validation to obtain ideal candidate molecules. The previous time-consuming high-throughput wet-lab screening model is transitioning towards "precise design + minimal validation," driven by new technologies that are upgrading the underlying model of the bioeconomy.

To accelerate the application of AI protein design technology, MoleculeMind has independently developed the world's first industrial-level platform that integrates sequence, structure, function, and evolution.AI Protein Generation Large ModelNewOrigin (Darwin), it can "customize" proteins with specific functions in a few hours or even minutes according to industrial application needs, with high success rates, strong versatility, and low usage thresholds. At the same time, MoleculeMind integrates the NewOrigin large model into MoleculeOS, an all-in-one AI platform for protein prediction, optimization, and design, providing users from different backgrounds and with varying needs in the bioeconomy sector with 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 area 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 each reaching hundreds of billions of dollars. The compound annual growth rate of the biopharmaceutical market exceeds 10%, while the biomanufacturing market is rapidly expanding at a compound annual growth rate of over 26%. In this global race, AI protein technology is becoming a revolutionary force reshaping the bioeconomic landscape.

    Wei Xiaolin, Founding Partner and Investment Committee Chairman of XieNuo InvestmentRepresented 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. Xiehe Investment firmly believes in the power of science and mission, and creating value through AI for the benefit of humanity is a future within reach. We are honored to partner with an excellent team like MoleculeMind to jointly shape the future."

    Zhou Yi, General Manager of Shenzhen Capital Group's Health Industry Investment Department"Intelligent infrastructure is a highly efficient 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 field of AI proteins, along with their large AI protein models and industrial application platforms, will lay a solid technical 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."

    Hu Yutong, Managing Partner of SenseTime Guoxiang Capital"MoleculeMind's practical achievements in AI protein optimization design demonstrate the great potential of generative AI in this field, which will help accelerate the transformation of the synthetic biology and pharmaceutical industries. Based on SenseTime’s comprehensive advantages in AI infrastructure and large models, both parties will jointly explore broader innovative spaces for AI technology in the biological field."

    Partner of Jiuyi Capital"Noted: '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.'"