MoleculeX Secures Hundreds of Millions in Series A Funding to Accelerate AI-Driven Biological Infrastructure

In the wave of intelligent upgrading of the bioeconomy,MoleculeMind, an industry-leading AI protein design platform company, announced that it has recently completed its Series A financing. This round of financing amounted to hundreds of millions of RMB, led jointly by Zenno Investment and Shenzhen Capital Group, with participation from SenseCapital and Everbright Investment.As an AI biologics design platform company with industry benchmark status, MoleculeMind's latest round of financing will further accelerate the construction of AI bio-infrastructure.

Founder of MoleculeMind, internationally renowned computational biologist Jinhong Xu"It said that this round of financing will be used to further expand the top composite talent team, deeply improve the AI protein basic large model, AI protein optimization design platform MoleculeOS, and other bioeconomic common technology platforms, and accelerate the industrial implementation and commercialization process of AI protein technology. 'We use AI to design super proteins that surpass natural evolution, and through the construction of AI protein infrastructure, we transform the scientific problem of protein design into an 'programmable' and 'predictable' engineering problem.'"

In addition, 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.

To date, MoleculeMind has completed three rounds of financing in total. Previous investors include leading synthetic biology company Cathay Biotech, Sequoia China, Baidu Ventures, Legend Capital, and others.

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, 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, eliminating the need for high-throughput screening. Only a small number of wet lab validations are required to accurately obtain the desired protein, significantly 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 innovation capabilities from 0 to 1, 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 design, offering broad industrial applications. However, due to its high complexity, there are currently no publicly mature methods available 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. These include NewOrigin (Darwin), the world's first industrial-level AI protein generation model that integrates sequence, structure, function, and evolution; a complex structure prediction algorithm with accuracy surpassing AlphaFold 3; and the world’s first algorithm capable of simultaneously predicting protein side chains and designing sequences, 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" seminar 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. Building on their understanding of the design of biological components like proteins, they systematically optimize 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 enzyme raw materials, MoleculeMind utilized AI technology to design an enzyme with extremely complex functions and a very large molecular weight. Given that 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 used AI to de novo design 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 an AI-bio interdisciplinary background 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 break through the century-old challenge of protein structure prediction. The new technical approach he pioneered was used by DeepMind in the development of AlphaFold, ushering in the era of AI-driven protein structure prediction and AI protein design. In 2022, Xu Jinbo returned to China to establish MoleculeMind, attracting a group of high-end talents from top 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 this globally rare top-tier team at the helm, 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 enterprises in pharmaceuticals, materials, chemicals, food, agriculture, and other fields. By leveraging AI-powered protein technology, it overcomes the limitations of traditional biological methods to design high-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-suppressing activity, it reduces toxicity (decreasing 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 optimized multiple objectives such as the stability and expression levels of the protein vaccine. Animal experiments have confirmed that the neutralizing antibody titer produced by the vaccine is several times higher than those disclosed in patents and related large pharmaceutical companies' protein vaccines, breaking through relevant vaccine stability patents.

More notably, among these industrial projects, AI-designed proteins take only 3 to 4 days, requiring only a small number of wet-lab validations to obtain ideal candidate molecules. The previous time-consuming high-throughput wet-lab screening model is transitioning towards "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 the world's first industrial-grade AI protein generation large model, NewOrigin (Darwin), which 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 barriers. At the same time, MoleculeMind has integrated the NewOrigin large model into MoleculeOS, a one-stop AI platform for protein prediction, optimization, and design. The platform serves users from various backgrounds and with different needs in the bioeconomy sector by providing protein design tools and services in multiple forms such as APIs, software, solutions, and technical services, lowering the application threshold of AI protein technology through the construction of 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 in scale. 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 landscape of the bioeconomy.

Wei Xiaolin, Founding Partner and Chairman of the Investment Committee of SenseCapitalRepresented by AlphaFold-2, AI-based protein structure prediction is one of the most important and groundbreaking 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 even greater, and MoleculeMind has built an outstanding technical platform for this purpose, achieving impressive progress. Meanwhile, the MoleculeMind team is highly efficient, fast-learning, and precise in commercialization, with rapid commercial progress in multiple fields, from supporting synthetic biology to large-molecule drug discovery. This commercial work, in turn, accelerates the iteration and enrichment of MoleculeMind's technology platform. SenseCapital firmly believes in the power of science and mission, and a future where AI benefits humanity and creates value is within reach. We are honored to partner with an excellent team like MoleculeMind to jointly create the future.

Zhou Yi, General Manager of the Health Industry Investment Department of Shenzhen Capital Group"Intelligent infrastructure is an 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, as well as 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."

SenseCapital Managing Partner Yu Tong Hu"MoleculeMind's practical achievements in AI protein optimization design demonstrate the enormous potential of generative AI in this field, which can help accelerate transformations in synthetic biology and the pharmaceutical industry. Leveraging SenseTime’s comprehensive advantages in large-scale AI infrastructure and models, both parties will jointly explore broader innovative spaces for AI technology within the biological domain."

Everbright Investment PartnerEverbright Investment stated: "Everbright 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 transformation of 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."