AccutarBio Secures $15 Million in China's Largest AI-Driven Drug Discovery Funding Round Led by IDG Capital and Yitu Technology

VCBeat has learned that AccutarBio recently completed a joint investment round led by IDG Capital and Yitu Technology. Combined with its previous angel round financing from ZhenFund, the company has raised a total of $15 million, marking one of the largest funding rounds in China’s AI-driven drug discovery sector to date.

Dr. Jie Fan, CEO of AccutarBio, earned his Master’s degree in Biostatistics from the University of California, Berkeley in 2004, and received his Ph.D. from the Weill Cornell Graduate School of Medical Sciences at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in 2010. He conducted his doctoral research under the supervision of Professor Nikola Pavletich, a member of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences (notably, Professor Yigong Shi, the renowned structural biologist and current Vice President of Tsinghua University, also served as a postdoctoral fellow in the same laboratory).

From 2010 to 2015, Dr. Fan Jie served as a postdoctoral researcher at Rockefeller University under the mentorship of Günter Blobel, the 1999 Nobel Laureate who established the signal peptide hypothesis. Dr. Blobel currently serves on the jury of the Lasker Award, often regarded as “America’s Nobel Prize,” with 86 Lasker laureates having also received the Nobel Prize.

The Rockefeller University is a research-intensive institution and one of the birthplaces of modern cell biology. Having produced more than 20 Nobel laureates, it stands as a premier academic stronghold for life sciences research. The university’s intellectually rich environment, populated by leading scholars, provided Dr. Fan Jie with exceptional opportunities for scientific growth. Through immersive exposure and direct collaboration with numerous academic luminaries, Dr. Fan developed a methodology that emphasizes guiding the selection of major scientific questions through a broad strategic perspective and addressing complex challenges by assembling top-tier, interdisciplinary teams.

Pharmaceutical development is a high-risk industry, particularly for early-stage investments in projects that have not yet entered clinical trials. The fact that Quan Zhou, a partner at IDG Capital, led the investment in AccutarBio signals that China’s top investors are beginning to bet on world-class, breakthrough drug discovery concepts.

AccutarBio has currently established AI computing laboratories and biochemistry laboratories in Shanghai and New York. In an on-site test conducted by a top-tier global pharmaceutical company, the computational predictions generated by AccutarBio’s 3D Molecular Operator and Deep Chemical Structure Network (Accutar ChemiNet) demonstrated a significant improvement in predictive accuracy compared to the company’s existing internal methods. It is anticipated that the adoption of these algorithms will substantially enhance the pharmaceutical company’s drug development efficiency and success rates.。

AccutarBio plans to further promote Accutar ChemiNet, as it “marks the first time witnessing a new paradigm of AI-guided drug development, which will bring revolutionary changes to the traditional experimental screening- and experience-based drug discovery processes.” Notably, the collaboration between AccutarBio and top-tier U.S. pharmaceutical companies signifies that Chinese AI-driven drug discovery teams have directly entered the forefront of innovative drug development, ending the historical phase in which China primarily relied on replicating and learning from other countries’ pharmaceutical R&D technologies for new drug development.。

AccutarBio is not only exploring new technologies in the pharmaceutical field but also actively participating in cutting-edge scientific research. Currently, AccutarBio maintains close collaborations with numerous renowned global scholars, including Nobel laureates, members of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, and Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) investigators from prestigious institutions such as Harvard University, Rockefeller University, and Stanford University. Professor Li Haitao, Deputy Director of the Department of Basic Medical Sciences at Tsinghua University School of Medicine, stated, “AccutarBio has delivered astonishing results, surpassing the analytical outcomes of world-renowned software in the prediction of drug and target structures, thereby providing a significant boost to our research efforts.”

As a strategic investor in AccutarBio, Yitu Technology stated, “Information asymmetry regarding interdisciplinary advancements creates significant barriers to technological development. We hope that our globally leading expertise and achievements in the field of AI can help AccutarBio attain Nobel-level accomplishments in biology. Furthermore, through in-depth collaboration, we believe artificial intelligence will substantially transform the current landscape of biological research and biopharmaceuticals, while our AI research partnership with Yitu Medical in clinical applications will deliver greater in-depth value to clinical practice.”