The "OpenAI Moment" for Pharma Labs: HeTan AI Raises 50 Million Yuan, Robot Scientists Step Onto the Lab Bench
The story of robot scientists has only just begun.
In the labs of BeiGene, a global leader in innovative drug development, a robot has been running pilot tests for 50 days. During this period, it has completed over 3,000 experimental operations — from molecular purification to complex workflows — with zero errors, demonstrating performance on par with a senior medicinal chemist. This is an industry first.
The robot system is Talos, developed by C12.ai, a Yunqi Capital portfolio company. Through proprietary sensors and its own VLA (Vision-Language-Action) architecture, Talos can understand experimental protocols, autonomously execute complex operations in real lab environments, and perform real-time reasoning and error correction during continuous experiments.
Recently, C12.ai closed a new RMB 50 million funding round led by Yonghua Capital, with follow-on participation from Wehao Chuangxin and individual investors. Yunqi Capital led the company's seed round in August 2022.
Founded in 2022, C12.ai is working to bring AI from the digital world into physical laboratories — enabling robots not just to "understand science," but to actually perform experiments with their own hands. This edition of Yunqi Portfolio takes you inside.
Yunqi's Take:
C12.ai's core mission is to bring AI into the physical world of scientific research. In recent years, artificial intelligence has shown promise in data analysis and molecular design. Systems like Talos push this further by enabling AI to participate in actual experiment execution, freeing scientists to focus on experimental design and critical decision-making.
In the long run, this human-machine collaboration model could significantly boost research efficiency. For us, C12.ai represents a new kind of experiment at the intersection of AI and experimental science. The story of the "robot scientist" is just beginning.
01 Breaking the "Rigid" Paradigm: From Repetitive Labor to Intelligent Replacement
For medicinal chemists, molecular purification is a particularly challenging step: it consumes roughly 50% of their working time and demands extensive operational experience and "feel." For years, lab automation has remained stuck in a rigid, single-purpose phase — expensive equipment that can't be reused across scenarios and fails the moment a workflow changes slightly.
C12.ai's Talos is effectively breaking through these limitations. As a general-purpose dual-arm mobile robot, Talos operates existing instruments like a human would, without requiring any lab retrofitting.
The key breakthrough lies in its proprietary VLA (Vision-Language-Action) architecture. This gives the robot a "brain" — rather than mechanically executing commands, it can understand objectives. In its deployment at BeiGene, Talos demonstrated performance approaching that of a chemist with ten years of experience. When robots can handle 80% of routine purification work, scientists can finally step away from tedious physical operations and focus on more creative research decisions.
02 A Pharma Veteran's Cross-Disciplinary Quest: Software-Defining the "Physical Scientist"
The precision with which C12.ai targets industry pain points stems from the technical depth and operational insight of founder and CEO Zhigang Chen.
A seasoned industry veteran, Chen previously served as chief architect at Alibaba Health, founder of Tencent's medical big data lab, and WuXi AppTec's first chief digital officer. He once used algorithms to raise traditional production equipment utilization from 40% to 60%, but through hands-on experience came to a deeper realization: the efficiency bottleneck in pharma isn't computing power — it's the connection to the physical world.
"Traditional automation solved standardization, but flexibility has always been the weak link," Chen said. "What we're building is a general-purpose, software-defined robot scientist."
This "software-defined hardware" approach gives C12.ai strong cross-scenario adaptability. Beyond pharmaceuticals, in flexible manufacturing for cosmetics and other "small-batch, high-mix" physical environments, Talos has shown significant commercial potential — from snapping a photo to identify a formula to completing overnight production and delivery, physical AI is reshaping the closed loop of production relationships.
03 The Future: Making Research More Efficient
With this funding round complete, C12.ai plans to continue product iteration and gradually expand application scenarios. The company's technical roadmap is extending along the drug development pipeline: from current purification experiments into ADME (drug metabolism and pharmacokinetics) studies, and eventually into GxP-compliant manufacturing and analytical processes.
"We're not building a single-point tool — we want the robot to progressively participate in more stages across a drug's entire lifecycle," Chen said. By having AI shoulder large volumes of repetitive experimental operations, C12.ai aims to improve overall R&D efficiency and let researchers concentrate more fully on innovation and decision-making.
More Coverage
C12.ai Closes RMB 50 Million Round as Robots Effectively Enter the Lab (by Anyong)
