Yuanshi Tech Closes Two Consecutive Rounds Near 100 Million Yuan, Dalton Venture Bets on AI General Cell Model to Accelerate Virtual Cell Technology
Recently, **YuanShi Technology announced that it has completed consecutive angel and angel+ funding rounds totaling nearly RMB 100 million. The angel round was co-led by Sinovation Ventures, Shanghai Future Industry Fund, and YanYuan Venture Capital; the angel+ round was invested by Monolith and Aochuang Pioneer Fund**, with the latter being co-established by Dalton Venture and listed industry player OPM Biosciences — the first bio-manufacturing industry CVC fund in the Yangtze River Delta region. **The proceeds from this round will mainly be**
Background
Yuanshi Technology recently announced the completion of two consecutive funding rounds — a near-100-million-yuan angel round and an angel+ round. The angel round was co-led by Sinovation Ventures, Shanghai Future Industry Fund, and YanYuan Venture Capital. The angel+ round saw participation from Monolith and Aochuang Pioneer Fund, the latter of which was co-founded by Dalton Venture and listed industry player OPM Biosciences as the Yangtze River Delta region's first CVC fund focused on bio-manufacturing. The proceeds will primarily fund model R&D, data and experimental platform development, and application validation for drug discovery scenarios.
From Molecular Design to Cellular Response Prediction: Expanding the Boundaries of AI-Driven Drug Discovery
Over the past five years, AI-driven drug discovery has focused mainly on single-point tasks: molecular generation, structure prediction, and property prediction. But as models have grown more capable at these isolated tasks, a deeper problem has emerged. Drug failures often stem not from poor molecular binding, but from the inability to accurately predict how cells, tissues, and organisms respond to a compound. The bottleneck in AI-driven drug discovery has shifted from molecular design as a standalone task to zero-shot generalization of disease response — the capacity to predict across new patient populations, tissue environments, and perturbation combinations.
This is precisely the problem that general-purpose cell models aim to solve: build a data engine from high-quality, large-scale, continuously accumulated perturbation data; use a cellular world model to learn the laws of cellular response; then, through experimental validation and feedback, bring the model ever closer to real biological systems. Yuanshi Technology hopes to push AI-driven drug discovery from single-point analysis toward broader high-dimensional prediction through a general-purpose cell model capable of zero-shot generalization across environments.
Building a Sustained Closed Loop of Cellular Understanding, Reasoning, and Prediction from Both Data and Model Sides
Yuanshi Technology is constructing an R&D system comprising model analysis, experimental validation, and results feedback to build a self-evolving virtual cell system.
In this architecture, the model learns patterns of cellular response from existing data and generates predictions for new research questions; experiments validate these predictions and fill gaps in current data coverage; validation results then feed back to update the model and refine subsequent research directions. Model, experiment, and feedback form a sustained closed loop.
Partnering with the Industrial Ecosystem to Explore Next-Generation Biological Infrastructure
Dalton Venture stated: "As life sciences evolves from 'experimental trial-and-error' toward 'systematic prediction,' the new generation of AI-driven drug discovery is gradually moving from single-sequence design into the deeper waters of 'AI plus systems biology.' We are highly optimistic about Yuanshi Technology's strategic foresight during this period of technological ascension. The team not only demonstrates cutting-edge international vision in the underlying architecture of general-purpose cell models, but more valuably possesses solid engineering execution capabilities — having initially operationalized an ultra-high-throughput cellular perturbation data pipeline at a highly competitive cost advantage.
"We believe that in the era of AI biology, high-quality causal perturbation data is the critical element driving models from 'correlation fitting' toward 'mechanistic generalization.' The 'data production — model prediction — wet-lab validation' closed loop that Yuanshi Technology is building promises to further advance the application of virtual cell technology in real-world scenarios. Going forward, Dalton Venture will leverage its industrial ecosystem in innovative drugs, CRO, and bio-manufacturing to collaborate with Yuanshi Technology in jointly exploring the commercialization of next-generation biological infrastructure."
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ID: daltonventure
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