Chemical.AI

Chemical.AI (智化科技) is a Wuhan-based company applying AI and chemical big data to preclinical chemical synthesis in drug R&D, aiming to speed up how molecules are made. It was founded by CEO Ning Xia (夏宁), who holds a PhD in organic chemistry from the French Academy of Sciences and has worked at the intersection of computation and chemical synthesis for over a decade . Per a Source Code Capital announcement, it raised an angel round from FreeS Fund in 2019, a Series A led by Sequoia China Seed Fund in 2021, and a nearly $15 million Series A+ in August 2021 led by Source Code Capital with Sequoia China, FreeS Fund and HuaFang Capital participating — funds earmarked for building out its AI-automated synthesis platform .

Its commercial roots run deep: Xia won first place in a synthesis-route-prediction competition run by WuXi AppTec before founding the company, and a 2016 demo to WuXi executives turned into an early commercial collaboration that pushed the product to meet big-pharma standards on security, speed and quality, per a FreeS Fund interview . In that same August 2026 conversation, Xia's assessment was that today's synthesis AI performs "roughly at the level of a chemist with 10 years of experience" — generating 5–6 route strategies where a human proposes 1–2, and running in 5 minutes routes that took clients a month or two to design — though he notes it innovates only from known reactions buried in the literature, not new ones .