According to the data monitoring of Pharma Intelligence, in April 2024, there were a total of18 companiesAI pharmaceutical-related companies have completed a new round of financing, with a disclosed total amount of approximately$1.298 billion (approximately RMB 9.404 billion), making it the month with the largest financing amount so far this year.
Financing Overview
In April, in China's domestic AI pharmaceuticals field, eight related companies successfully obtained a new round of financing, with financing activities mainly distributed in regions with relatively active economies.The Yangtze River Delta Region and the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area。In the early projects, two AI + protein-related service providers received financing, namelyShanghaiMatwings TechnologyCompleted tens of millions of yuan in Pre-A round financing, and has successfully delivered multiple AI-designed proteins; anotherBaikui Rui (Shenzhen) Biotechnology Co., Ltd.GENTLEGEN Completes Tens of Millions of Yuan in Series A Financing, Focusing on the Industrialization and Commercialization of Protein and Enzyme Design in the Field of Synthetic Biology.Apart from the aforementioned two companies,RAIN BIOTECH SOLUTIONS in Hong KongSuccessfully Completed Seed Round Financing`, the company is committed to the research and development of AI-driven cell preparation equipment; focusing on providing one-stop gene services that are automated and intelligent.`GENTLEGENAlso received tens of millions of yuan in fundingGold Support; Focus on AI + Small Molecule Drug DevelopmentSaitoming QiangCompleted over 100 million yuan in Series A+ financing.In addition, two companies with relatively mature business models located in Shanghai,Yituo Pharmaceuticals and APTBIOThey have respectively completed billions of yuan in B+ and C rounds of financing, accelerating the AI-enabled discovery of "undruggable" targets and the application of AI big data combined with mass spectrometry multi-omics technology.Targeting T Cell Exhaustion, Developing Metabolism-Enhanced Cancer Immunotherapy DrugsShenzhen Leash Biosciences, receiving tens of millions of yuan in project funding from the Comprehensive National Science Center for Health Research in Hefei.From a global perspective, the hot topic of the month is undoubtedlyXaira TherapeuticsAn AI pharmaceutical company supported by a top-tier team has completed over $1 billion in financing, becoming the largest investment in the biopharmaceutical field so far this year. Xaira Therapeutics also stated that it will apply AI in three areas: discovering new biology, designing molecules, and conducting clinical trials.Among startups, Diagonal Therapeutics, which leverages AI for antibody development, has also achieved remarkable results, completing a Series A funding round of $128 million, and is committed to the development of agonistic antibody drugs.Somite.AI Targets AI-Driven Transformation of Cell Therapy, Led by Professors from Harvard and MIT, New Company Raises $5.3 Million in Funding with the Goal of Becoming the "OpenAI of Stem Cell Therapy."Machine Learning Solutions for Drug Chemistry Company Leash Biosciences Announces $9.3 Million Seed FundingShifting focus away from the U.S., Qureight, an AI biotech startup headquartered in Cambridge, U.K., announced an $8.5 million Series A funding round to help accelerate drug development by improving the efficiency of clinical trials and data analysis.Cognivia, another company located in Belgium that leverages AI solutions to advance clinical trials, has received 15.5 million euros in strategic investment. It is the first company to combine the quantification of patient psychology with artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) algorithms.In April, the companies that completed financing covered multiple aspects such as protein synthesis, small molecule drugs, clinical trials, medicinal chemistry, cell therapy, and antibody drugs.The following is a summary of financing:
Details of Financing Events
Amount: Tens of Millions of YuanBaikui RuiIt is an antibiotic resistance biosynthesis R&D provider that builds a technology platform for precise protein design and protein molecular machines. It focuses on areas such as skin efficacy skincare, rare metabolic diseases, and pet intestinal health treatment. Using synthetic biology techniques such as gene editing, it targets harmful bacteria or toxins that affect human health for therapeutic purposes.Amount: Nearly HKD 10 millionRAIN BIOTECH SOLUTIONSIt is an intelligent AI-driven cell production solution provider, focusing on intelligent AI-driven cell production solutions to promote the development of regenerative medicine and biotechnology industries. The company's core business is the intelligent equipment for the cell industry. Based on its microfluidic technology, AI technology, and iPS cell culture technology, it provides AI-driven cell sorting, imaging, and culture equipment for the regenerative medicine field.Amount: Hundreds of Millions of YuanAPTBIO was founded in 2004, with its headquarters located in Shanghai. Originally known as the Proteomics Research and Analysis Center of the Shanghai Institutes for Biological Sciences, Chinese Academy of Sciences, it is a life science technology service provider driven by mass spectrometry multi-omics.The company has established four major technological platforms: a large-cohort multi-omics research technology platform, an early biopharmaceutical and preclinical CMC research and analysis platform, a biopharmaceutical and medical device registration and approval platform, and an AI big data algorithm platform. It has laid out three major business sectors: technology services, biopharmaceuticals, and large health consumer medical CRO services, constructing a life sciences and large health commercial landscape that integrates AI big data with mass spectrometry multi-omics technology applications.Amount: Tens of Millions of YuanGENTLEGENIt is a biotechnology high-tech company with expertise in biosynthesis and chemical synthesis technologies, specializing in automated and intelligent one-stop gene services. Engaged in the research, development, and production of oligonucleotide chemical synthesis, gene synthesis, and related technological applications, it provides comprehensive solutions for fields such as molecular diagnostics, nucleic acid chemistry, synthetic biology, and antibody drug development.Yituo MedicineFocused on the development of small-molecule drugs targeting protein liquid-liquid phase separation, independently developed the world's leading protein liquid-liquid phase separation technology platform – the LLPS platform. This platform integrates AI-powered phase separation target discovery, high-throughput and high-content drug screening, and drug optimization technologies.Amount: Tens of Millions of YuanMatwings Technology was founded in 2021 by a research team from Shanghai Jiao Tong University and is a provider of AI protein design services.Matwings TechnologyThe self-developed AI protein design large model — AccelProtein™ — adopts the advanced Transformer architecture and masked language model. Trained on complex data comprising 780 million protein sequences from organisms across various environments, the model has mastered the intricate semantic relationship between protein sequences and their functions. It achieves end-to-end prediction from "sequence to function" and possesses genuine zero-shot prediction capability.Saitoming Strong
Amount: Over 100 Million YuanSettemin Qiang is an innovative small molecule drug developer that has built the SigmaHit® technology platform driven by AI for ultra-large-scale drug design and screening, focusing on drug research and development in the fields of oncology, autoimmune diseases, and the central nervous system.Leash Biosciences is a company that focuses on T cell exhaustion and develops metabolism-enhanced tumor immunotherapy drugs. Leash Biosciences has developed an immune metabolic reprogramming technology (Meta 10) and established a proprietary technology platform for the discovery, research, and production of biologics and novel immunocyte drugs. Meanwhile, leveraging the artificial intelligence (AI) technology from XtalPi, the company has further built an AI-driven new drug development platform.Amount: 9.3 million US dollarsLeash Biosciences aims to develop a fundamental and general machine learning model for medicinal chemistry, which can accurately predict small-molecule drug candidates for any protein, and more broadly, predict interactions between any protein and any chemical substance.Amount: 24.6 million US dollarsDeepCure is a developer of novel small-molecule therapies, utilizing an AI-powered drug discovery engine to develop new small molecules. The company is advancing multiple novel preclinical candidates, aiming to leverage AI-driven discovery to create better molecules and faster treatments for every disease-related protein target.Amount: 5.3 million US dollarsSomite.AI is an AI cell therapy developer. The company plans to use AI to redefine cell therapy for the treatment of hereditary musculoskeletal disorders and metabolism-related diseases, including muscular dystrophy, obesity, and diabetes.Round: Strategic InvestmentAmount: 15.5 million eurosCognivia is the first and currently the only company that combines patient psychological quantification with artificial intelligence (AI)/machine learning (ML) algorithms to improve the evaluation of treatment efficacy in clinical trials and other fields.Cognivia's Solution Targets Placebo Response and Medication Adherence in Clinical Trials. By utilizing predictive algorithms to mitigate the negative impact of placebo responses, it enhances the research capability of clinical trials, thereby increasing success rates, shortening trial durations, and reducing costs.Amount: 1 billion US dollarsXaira Therapeutics, founded in May 2023, is a biotechnology company that leverages artificial intelligence to empower drug discovery. Xaira Therapeutics aims to apply AI in three areas: discovering new biology, designing molecules, and conducting clinical trials. Currently, the company is focused on proteomics, which involves studying how proteins change in health and disease.Amount: Tens of Millions of YuanCartaBio has established the world's first multimodal large model platform, CellBERT, centered on cells and integrating spatial omics with non-spatial multi-omics data. The platform possesses self-learning "cellular rule" capabilities, enabling unified integration and processing of cellular dictionaries, cellular maps, and drug mechanisms. Compared with similar large models, CellBERT supports multimodal data (including spatial omics data and other cellular multi-omics data) and significantly increases the scale of processable data.Amount: 40 million US dollarsRubedo Life Sciences Develops Drugs That Selectively Target Aging-Related Pathological Cells to Slow Disease Progression and Improve Health.Its treatment method relies on the AI-driven drug discovery platform Alembic™ and the chemical platform SenTech, which have the potential to achieve synergy between complex computational algorithms and chemistry.Amount: 128 million US dollarsAI Pharmaceutical Company Diagonal Therapeutics is dedicated to developing agonist antibodies. Its platform integrates proprietary computational and experimental techniques to identify rare agonist antibodies that reactivate defective signaling pathways, generating a series of novel therapies.Amount: 8.5 million US dollarsQureight was founded in 2018. The company uses its proprietary artificial intelligence platform to help accelerate the drug development process by improving the efficiency of clinical trials and data analysis.Amount: 4 million US dollarsYoneda Labs Founded in 2023 to Develop Fundamental Models for Chemical Manufacturing. The company uses artificial intelligence to guide chemists in creating new drugs, accelerating drug discovery and reducing the costs of chemical manufacturing.Recommended Reading
