Helixon Closes Nearly RMB 500 Million Series A Round, AI-Powered Large-Molecule Drug Discovery

Helixon recently announced the completion of a nearly 500 million yuan Series A funding round. The round was led by 5Y Capital, with follow-on investments from Gaorong Ventures, Neumann Capital, and three angel-round investors — Xiang He Capital, Hillhouse, and Tsingzhi Capital.

Helixon will continue to deepen its focus on AI-powered drug discovery, expand its team and business development capabilities, enhance its AI high-performance computing infrastructure, and scale up its high-throughput experimental platform, while advancing both its proprietary pipeline and external partnerships.

Helixon is building next-generation AI scientific computing platforms, combined with proprietary high-throughput biological experimentation technologies, to provide drug researchers with intelligent systems for molecular computation, simulation, and design at the microscopic level.

Developing Revolutionary Algorithms, Building a Pipeline in Large Molecules and Immunotherapy

In drug discovery, particularly for large-molecule therapeutics, Helixon is innovatively developing efficient machine learning algorithms and data acquisition technologies to restructure the drug development process, dramatically accelerating R&D speed and efficiency. Since its founding in June 2021, Helixon has remained at the forefront of both industry and research. The company has already developed multiple revolutionary algorithms for protein drug design and modeling, integrating them with its high-throughput experimental platform to complete a highly efficient closed loop of AI design and experimental validation.

As its platform technology matures, Helixon has begun building multiple large-molecule and immunotherapy pipelines, with expectations to rapidly advance them to clinical stages.

Since last year, Helixon has attracted top experts and young scientists from leading artificial intelligence research, structural biology, and disease research institutions worldwide. Its world-class technical capabilities, strong R&D team, and clear commercial positioning have earned broad recognition from capital markets, enabling this funding round to close efficiently.

Accelerating Partnerships and Pipeline Development, Using AI to Protect Human Health

Helixon founder Jian Peng is a world-renowned computational biologist and senior visiting professor at Tsinghua University's Institute for AI Industry Research (AIR). He was previously an associate professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Peng is also a recipient of the Overton Prize and the Sloan Research Fellowship, two of the highest honors in computational biology.

"This funding round is a strong validation of market confidence in Helixon's technology and business development," said Jian Peng. "I want to thank 5Y Capital, Gaorong Ventures, Neumann Capital, and our existing shareholders for their full support. We will move forward with unwavering determination, increase R&D investment, accelerate partnerships and pipeline development, and use artificial intelligence to protect human health."