Chai Discovery

Meet Dr. Mikael Dolsten.

He was the chief scientific officer of Pfizer for 16 years and serves on the boards of Agilent Technologies, Rocket Pharma, and cutting-edge AI startups like Chai Discovery, Orbis Medicines, and Immune AI.

He's on a mission to eradicate disease and unlock unimaginable human potential.

Welcome, Mikel.

And it's got the valuation from nothing to $4 billion in a year.

Oh,

is this Chai Discovery?

That was Chai Discovery.

The next highlight is a fairly quick one and you may have heard of AlphaFold3 from Google DeepMind about predicting the structure of proteins, DNA and more.

But I didn't know that there was Chai1 from Chai Discovery backed by OpenAI which is an open source alternative.

Nor did I know that its performance in certain domains is comparable or superior to AlphaFold3.

AlphaFold3, don't forget, has not been fully open sourced.

You were early at OpenAI, like early, early, early, like almost a decade ago at OpenAI, and then at Meta, uh, built the first, uh, life sciences product, which is almost half of all citations today are, are citing your work with, um, ESM1.

You started Chai Discovery to make dis- drug discovery an engineering problem, uh, as you call it, the CAD suite for molecules, and you've raised from the who's who, from OpenAI, from, from Anthropic, from, from Thrive at, at a, at a, at a big price.

So we are very excited to get into it.

Thank you so much for, for joining us.

We begin with the integration of artificial intelligence into drug discovery.

GSK's recent collaboration with Chai Discovery exemplifies the growing trend of using AI to transform research and development processes.

By integrating AI into its drug discovery platform, GSK aims to expedite the development of novel therapeutics, particularly antibodies.

This partnership underscores the potential for machine learning algorithms to not only accelerate discovery but also enhance the precision and efficacy of treatments.

There's no drugs yet in development in the clinic.

And 40 billion valuation is roughly 10 times the nearest comparable we have, which is Chai Discovery.

So investors aren't buying a sort of pipeline of drug discovery here.

They're buying the Solval disease platform and they're buying Demis.

Um, there's a domain around science and kind of the frontier that's becoming very interesting, right? Can you automate labs and do materials discovery, do drug discovery, do, you know...

We have investors in Chai Discovery, which is, uh-

Yeah

... helping find antibodies-

Uh, one of the biggest challenges that we have faced is funding, right? As a company who's doing deep tech, biotech, um, no revenue for a long period of time, there's a gestation period, right? So we've struggled with getting funds, and only recently we were able to close a $6 million fund, whereas our competitors in the US are raising like $11 million seed, and then another $30 million post that.

Chai Discovery is one of our competitors.

They recently raised-- I think they raised, uh, 130, followed by a six-month later, another 130 million.

So, you know, compared to that kind of capital, of course, we don't have that capital.