Insights / Topics
Tech bio is closer to a software-economics business than to traditional biotech, and most strategy mistakes come from missing that. Essays on what changes when biology is the product and engineering is the moat.
21 May 2026 · 1 min read
Nature published three AI scientist systems on the same day this week — FutureHouse's Robin, Google's Co-Scientist, and ERA — and the detail that matters for pharma is what they run on. Peer review commoditised the reasoning; the real edge still sits in proprietary data and lab throughput that these systems cannot reach.
19 May 2026 · 3 min read
AstraZeneca's licensing of Owkin's K Pro platform signals where agentic AI is actually landing in pharma right now — competitive intelligence — not the broader scientific autonomy the positioning implies. I break down which workflows are realistic today and why the teams that start with unglamorous, high-leverage tasks will be best positioned when the harder problems become tractable.
14 May 2026 · 4 min read
I spoke at the Global Health Exhibition Capital Xchange webinar opened by the Saudi Ministry of Health, and the headline story in healthcare venture this year is concentration — less capital, larger checks, AI dominating in techbio and clinical workflows, and a Saudi market that is shifting from consumer to producer economy.
12 May 2026 · 4 min read
Isomorphic Labs is in advanced talks to raise more than $2B, and I'm of two minds about it. The capital is welcome, but the deeper question is whether tech boards will stay patient through a decade of clinical iteration — and whether anyone is funding the downstream bottleneck that more AI-generated candidates will only tighten.
7 May 2026 · 3 min read
Most AI-first techbios are modeling clinical costs that are roughly half of what they will actually face — and the capital required to put an AI-derived molecule in front of a patient has roughly doubled within the lifespan of one mRNA company. Discovery cost reductions are real and welcome, but the binding constraint sits elsewhere.
16 Apr 2026 · 3 min read
Last week, OpenAI made two moves in pharma within 48 hours — a flagship enterprise deal with Novo Nordisk and the launch of GPT-Rosalind — and the sequencing tells a deliberate story about how they're building a verticalised commercial infrastructure for life sciences. Having sat on the pharma buyer side, I break down what that cadence actually accomplishes.
14 Apr 2026 · 3 min read
The hyperscalers are moving on drug discovery from every direction — Anthropic acquired Coefficient Bio, and AWS just launched Amazon Bio Discovery with 40+ biological foundation models and integrated CRO partners. I still don't think the commercial model of pharma is under major threat, but the R&D part is clearly heating up massively.
7 Apr 2026 · 4 min read
Most coverage frames the Coefficient Bio acquisition as a valuation story: $44M per head, a 38,000% return, eight months old, no product, no revenue. All true. All missing the point. Anthropic bought the scientific decision layer.
31 Mar 2026 · 3 min read
Eli Lilly’s third Insilico deal in three years: $115M upfront, up to $2.75B in milestones, plus royalties. The progression from software licensing in 2023 to a $2.75B commitment in 2026 tells the real story. The signal for the rest of the AI drug discovery space is harder to read — deals like this concentrate pharma attention on proven platforms.
26 Mar 2026 · 3 min read
A company you’ve most likely never heard of just raised $787M for AI-driven biologics. The headline number is striking. Sanofi’s trajectory — partner to repeat customer to investor in under twelve months — tells you more about the platform than any press release. The Delaware-incorporated, Beijing-operating structure is the emerging architecture for Chinese AI biotech going global.
10 Mar 2026 · 4 min read
Three big AI drug discovery launches in 90 days: Boltz, IsoDDE, OpenFold3. Every benchmark was built by the team that built the model. The real question isn’t which model has the best benchmark. It’s whether discovery teams have a rigorous internal framework to evaluate any model that shows up. The real moat is evaluation discipline.
24 Feb 2026 · 3 min read
Europe keeps asking “will AI in pharma R&D mean fewer jobs?” That’s the wrong question. The right one is who captures the value. Adoption is real but structurally slow. TechBio reshapes the pipeline economy. Data hunger grows. The real risk: while Europe debates headcount, the platforms and IP get built elsewhere.
17 Feb 2026 · 2 min read
Barely a month goes by without another billion-dollar AI discovery deal. But Takeda’s deal with Iambic isn’t about buying AI — it’s about acquiring binding intelligence. If it works, portfolio strategy shifts from option value through volume to option value through precision. The hard part is industrializing it.
29 Jan 2026 · 3 min read
Hologen, Eric Schmidt’s stealth biotech-AI venture, is raising $150M at an $850M pre-money on a promise of 100% returns in 12 months. The pitch is closer to financial underwriting than AI product development. Here’s what would convince me it’s more than narrative.
6 Jan 2026 · 2 min read
Insilico Medicine closed 2025 with a ~US$293M HKEX IPO and opened 2026 with an $888M oncology collaboration with Servier — two major pharma deals in two months that suggest repeatable demand for their AI drug discovery platform.
5 Jan 2026 · 2 min read
I'm sharing my 5 bets for AI in Healthcare and TechBio in 2026 — from ambient scribes becoming table stakes to a TechBio Series B shakeout accelerating. If one of these is wrong, I want to know which one and what would change your mind.
16 Dec 2025 · 3 min read
OpenAI is among the backers of Chai Discovery, a biotech founded in 2024 already valued at $1.3B — and I think the real question isn't whether their antibody design model works, but whether model-layer innovation becomes infrastructure or a durable moat.
11 Dec 2025 · 1 min read
My former colleagues at Novartis just signed a $1.7B deal with a seed-stage company — not for a drug or a molecule, but for targets. This signals a real shift in where pharma sees risk and is willing to pay in the value chain.
9 Dec 2025 · 3 min read
Most AI drug discovery decks assume chemistry will keep up — but small molecule chemistry is still slow, manual, and spread across vendors, which is where a lot of AI 'efficiency' quietly disappears. I look at why fixing chemistry first may be the real unlock, and at the teams finally treating it as the main problem to solve.
1 Dec 2025 · 2 min read
MIT just open-sourced BoltzGen, a generative AI for protein binder design — but I don't think it disrupts AI drug discovery companies any more than Linux killed software. The moat was never the model; it's proprietary data, wet-lab validation, and pharma relationships.
20 Nov 2025 · 1 min read
Jeff Bezos just bet $106M on Profluent, a company using frontier AI models to design proteins that don't exist in nature — and I break down exactly what makes these models 'frontier' and why it matters for programmable biology.
8 Oct 2025 · 3 min read
I joined an inspiring panel this morning at BioTechX with investors from Flagship Pioneering, Hikma Pharmaceuticals, MTIP, Lauxera Capital Partners, and Archimed to discuss where we stand on the journey of cracking biology and health with AI. From agentic AI and defensible moats to the tech-bio platform vs. pipeline dilemma and whether we're in an AI bubble, the conversation covered the full frontier.
6 Oct 2025 · 1 min read
I attended an inspiring talk from Sergei Yakneen, CTO at Isomorphic Labs, at BiotechX2025 in Basel — and it's clear that Google's Alphabet subsidiary is really onto something with their AlphaFold3-powered approach to AI drug discovery at scale.
6 Oct 2025 · 1 min read
I attended an exciting panel on GenAI's impact in preclinical development, featuring voices from Novartis, Insilico Medicine, and INVIDIA. Key themes included the balance of AI opportunity and risk, the power of robotics combined with AI, and the ongoing challenge of data organization and institutional memory in the lab.
22 Sept 2025 · 1 min read
Flagship Pioneering's Lila Sciences just raised $235M in Series A to build AI-and-robotics-powered "science factories" — and I think the full-stack automation thesis is more compelling than AI-alone approaches for drug discovery.
18 Jun 2025 · 1 min read
I joined an interesting discussion on AI in drug discovery and development at HLTHEurope2025 with panelists from Novartis, Roche, and OWKIN. From real-world evidence generation to biomarker development and regulatory considerations, the conversation covered both the opportunities and challenges of bringing AI into pharma.
3 Apr 2025 · 1 min read
Google DeepMind's spin-off Isomorphic Labs has just raised $600M from Thrive Capital and GV, the latest mega-round in the blazing AI-enabled drug discovery space. I'm watching closely to see whether bigger funding truly translates to tangible clinical results in this rapidly emerging field.
13 Feb 2025 · 1 min read
I explore whether AI is truly rewriting the rules of drug discovery or just riding a wave of hype — from Latent Labs' €48M funding round to the real-world limits of fully in silico drug development. I genuinely believe we'll see the first 100% AI-discovered drug hit the market within the next 5–7 years.
28 Jan 2025 · 1 min read
It currently feels like a new techbio AI drug discovery play is launched on a weekly basis, showing the AI hype in this field isn't over yet. I'm curious to see how this new generation of companies will fare compared to previous biotech platform plays, given that many steps like MedChem and Toxicology still take time even with AI acceleration.
14 Jan 2025 · 1 min read
One of the first tech-bio deals out of JPM this year sees Insilico Medicine and MENARINI Group deepen their partnership around an AI-discovered asset — not an AI platform — potentially worth up to $550M. I'm curious which business model will emerge as the leader for AI-techbio companies: selling AI platforms and services, or developing your own pipeline.
4 Dec 2024 · 1 min read
I attended a fascinating panel at Health Tech Forward on Automation in Clinical Trials featuring in-silico trials and digital twins. Speakers from QuantHealth, a leading VC, and United Therapeutics shared how AI is cutting trial lengths, replacing animal models, and opening new doors for orphan disease research.
28 Nov 2024 · 1 min read
Cradle, a Netherlands-based generative AI biotech startup, just raised a $73M Series B — a round that's truly big by EU standards and signals the explosive growth of AI-driven drug discovery. I see real parallels to the rise of Veeva, and the coming years promise to be game-changing.
18 Nov 2024 · 1 min read
Formation Bio, in collaboration with Sanofi and OpenAI, has introduced Muse, an AI-powered tool designed to optimize patient recruitment in clinical trials. I think it will be fascinating to watch how this three-party collaboration — Big Pharma, Health Tech, and Large Tech — evolves, and I wouldn't be surprised to see more of these partnerships emerge in the coming year.
9 Oct 2024 · 1 min read
I attended a fascinating panel on the Hype vs Hope of AI in Drug Discovery at BiotechX in Basel this morning. The conversation surfaced some sharp insights on where AI is genuinely moving the needle in drug discovery — and where the hype still outpaces reality.
10 Sept 2024 · 1 min read
Another significant $120M funding round has landed in AI-driven drug discovery, this time with Lilly leading alongside Nvidia and key VC funds. I'm optimistic that we could be witnessing the birth of the next Amgen, Genentech, or Biogen — powered by AI.
20 Aug 2024 · 1 min read
I'm curious to see how the AI drug discovery space will evolve following the Recursion/Exscientia merger — and I'd personally bet on the traditional biotech drug-development model with AI enablement, rather than a pure SaaS or CRO play.
2 Jul 2024 · 1 min read
PharmaTech is increasingly becoming a category on its own, with PitchBook launching a dedicated research report and Q1 2024 seeing $749 million in funding across 39 deals. I think it's worth examining how they define the category, given the interesting mix of CDMO/CMO activities and AI enablement they cluster together.
27 Jun 2024 · 1 min read
Despite the challenging fundraising environment, we are witnessing significant investments in AI-enabled drug discovery and development. Formation Bio's nearly $400M Series D and Xaira Therapeutics' emergence from stealth mode signal intensifying competition among major VC funds to lead in AI-powered biotech innovations.