Galixir Secures Nearly $10 Million in Pre-A Funding to Advance AI-Driven Drug Discovery

Galixir Announces Completion of Nearly $10 Million Pre-A Financing RoundGalixir recently announced the completion of its Pre-A financing round, raising nearly $10 million. The round was co-led by DCM and Source Code Capital, with participation from Morningside Ventures. Gaorong Ventures, the lead investor in Galixir’s angel round, continued to increase its investment. The proceeds will be primarily used for the company’s R&D initiatives, including the development of its technology platform and the expansion of its technical team.

Galixir, established in 2019, is a solutions provider empowering new drug R&D with AI technology. The company is committed to integrating cutting-edge artificial intelligence with pharmaceutical, chemical, and biological technologies to build an AI-driven drug discovery platform. This platform helps scientists explore a broader druggable space, reduce drug development costs, and shorten the new drug R&D cycle. In November 2019, Galixir was selected as a participant in the Merck China Accelerator program.

According to research data published in Nature, developing a new drug—from project initiation to regulatory approval for market launch—takes an average of 10 to 15 years and incurs R&D costs of nearly $3 billion, with these costs continuing to rise year by year.

Meanwhile, according to Deloitte’s research and statistics, the return on investment (ROI) for new drug development among large biopharmaceutical companies has dropped to a nine-year low of just 1.9%.

For large pharmaceutical companies with annual R&D expenditures exceeding $10 billion, high-intensity investment does not necessarily yield commensurate returns. The declining return on R&D investment has, in turn, spurred a division of labor between large pharmaceutical enterprises and R&D-focused technology companies.

As traditional drug development continues to grapple with the dual bottlenecks of high costs and low success rates, a growing number of scientists are turning their attention to artificial intelligence (AI), a technology that has gained significant traction in recent years, in the hope that AI will provide novel insights and inspiration.

Against this industry backdrop, Galixir, dedicated to empowering new drug R&D with AI, has proposed corresponding solutions and completed two consecutive funding rounds—Angel and Pre-A—within just six months, raising over $10 million.

“Leveraging artificial intelligence technology, clients can utilize deep learning models to train on datasets. The trained models can automatically perform molecular design, synthesis planning, drug property prediction, and optimization, truly alleviating client burdens and enhancing return on investment,” said Dr. Li Chengtao, Founder and CEO.

Currently, Galixir has completed the development of multiple drug R&D modules, including retrosynthesis prediction, drug screening, and molecular design. The company has delivered design solutions to several clients and become a strategic partner of well-known pharmaceutical companies in China, collaborating with industry experts to deeply explore the application of artificial intelligence in drug discovery and development.

Notably, the company has also published multiple academically influential papers with significant industry impact at top-tier international artificial intelligence conferences such as ICML and NeurIPS.

Today, Galixir has assembled top international talent in the fields of artificial intelligence, chemistry, and biology. Its core team members hail from prestigious universities both domestically and abroad, including MIT, Yale University, Tsinghua University, and Peking University, as well as leading internet companies and multinational pharmaceutical firms.

Dr. Li Chengtao, Founder & CEO of Galixir, earned his bachelor’s degree from the Yao Class at Tsinghua University and later obtained his Ph.D. in Computer Science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). He has published multiple papers at top-tier artificial intelligence conferences and is recognized as one of the leading scholars in the interdisciplinary field of AI and chemistry.

The company’s other expert advisory team comprises senior professors and scholars from top universities and research institutions, including the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Tsinghua University, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, and Fudan University.

Dr. Li Chengtao

Founder & CEO of Galixir

Regarding investment logic, Zhenyu Zeng, Director and Partner at DCM China, stated, “DCM has always been highly attentive to the commercial opportunities presented by AI applications across various industries. Drug R&D is a sector particularly well-suited for AI to create value. Traditionally, drug development has relied heavily on manual expertise, been time-consuming, and generated vast amounts of data whose potential remains largely untapped. We are optimistic about Galixir’s team, which is leveraging artificial intelligence to inject new vitality into traditional drug R&D.”

Huang Yungang, Partner at Source Code Capital, stated, “Amid the confluence of technological transformation, talent accumulation, and national strategy, China’s innovative drug R&D is in a golden period, with new technologies being key to achieving leapfrog breakthroughs. In recent years, the importance of data science in drug development has risen rapidly. Particularly with the integration of machine learning, the combination of data and algorithms has yielded encouraging results in modeling and analyzing complex problems; this, in turn, further promotes the generation of massive datasets and the iteration of algorithms, significantly transforming the methodological framework of drug R&D. The team at Galixir possesses strong interdisciplinary expertise in machine learning, chemistry, and biology, along with extensive engineering experience. We are confident that the team will achieve significant accomplishments in the field of AI-driven new drug development.”

Morningside Ventures stated, “Drug discovery is one of the vertical industries best suited for leveraging the advantages of artificial intelligence (AI) and generating commercial impact. This is not only because target proteins and drug molecules are highly structured chemical entities that naturally align with AI’s computational logic, but also because the large-scale generation of novel druggable molecules brings more than just efficiency improvements to the industry—it systematically creates new supply, thereby driving the reshaping of the entire industry’s value chain and its digital transformation. Schrödinger’s performance on Nasdaq further demonstrates global investors’ recognition of the platform-enabled business model for drug R&D. In China, a vast market in urgent need of pharmaceutical innovation, innovative companies equipped with AI-powered platform technologies for drug discovery hold significant promise. Galixir’s AI capabilities and its deep understanding of industry-specific challenges exceed our expectations for a startup. We are confident that it will deliver substantial industry and commercial value in the future.”

A partner at Gaorong Ventures stated, “Life sciences and information technology are areas of sustained focus for Gaorong Ventures. We firmly believe that great technology companies will inevitably emerge at the intersection of these two disciplines. The past decade has witnessed the rapid advancement of artificial intelligence (AI), which is playing a significant role in addressing some of humanity’s most critical challenges, with pharmaceutical development being a key application area. This field also presents substantial challenges, requiring teams to master cutting-edge AI technologies while possessing a deep understanding of the pharmaceutical industry. Galixir boasts a cross-disciplinary team comprising top-tier talent in AI, chemistry, and biology. We believe that Dr. Li Chengtao and his team’s technological explorations and their efforts to overcome R&D pain points will drive the company toward becoming a world-leading AI-driven drug discovery enterprise.”