$3.8bn valuation, well done, Chai Discovery

$3.8bn valuation, well done, Chai Discovery.

My former colleagues at Novartis expanded its year-long partnership with Chai Discovery. The day after, Chai raised $400 million at a $3.8 billion valuation. Lilly and Pfizer are already customers.

The company is barely two years old and has no drug of its own. That is the point. Chai sells the design machinery and has been explicit that it will not build a pipeline. Pharma can run its general models, train private versions on proprietary data, and wire them into internal workflows without funding a future competitor.

That is the opposite of the move Anthropic made when it launched Claude Science and said it would develop drugs itself. A company thinks twice before handing its data and workflows to a partner that also wants the resulting medicine.

The founders and team explain the valuation as much as the customers do. CEO Joshua Meier helped build ESM-1, one of the first protein language models, at Meta, then led AI research at Absci. OpenAI backed the seed round. Former Pfizer R&D chief Mikael Dolsten sits on the board.

The $190 billion question (2024 combined R&D spending of top 20 pharma) is who owns molecule selection. Chai just priced its answer at $3.8 billion.