Chemical.AI, an intelligent chemical synthesis platform, announced the completion of a nearly $15 million Series A+ funding round led by Source Code Capital.

源码资本·August 9, 2021·2·5

Dedicated to solving new drug synthesis problems through artificial intelligence and chemical big data

Chemical.AI recently announced the completion of a nearly $15 million Series A+ round, led by Source Code Capital with participation from HSG, FreeS Fund, and Hofon Capital. The funding will primarily go toward building out its AI-powered automated synthesis platform and professional market expansion. Previously, the company raised an angel round from FreeS Fund in 2019, followed by a Series A in 2021 led by HSG with participation from Nest.Bio Ventures and FreeS Fund.

Chemical.AI is an AI-enabled chemical synthesis technology company dedicated to solving preclinical drug discovery challenges through artificial intelligence and chemical big data, dramatically improving molecular synthesis efficiency. The founding team has spent over a decade in cheminformatics, amassing extensive R&D experience and substantial specialized data in the chemical industry, making them early movers in China's AI-powered chemical synthesis segment.

On securing this round, Dr. Ning Xia, founder and CEO of Chemical.AI, said: "Thanks to our early start and solid technical foundation, the Chemical.AI team has made strong progress in intelligent synthesis, with broad growth prospects — that's the main reason we closed this round. This funding will help us further refine our automated synthesis platform and experimental data collection, becoming an AI platform company serving synthesis R&D enterprises, and ultimately advancing the entire molecular synthesis industry from the 'manual era' to the 'intelligent era'."

In chemical synthesis, although automated equipment is gradually being adopted, getting a computer to design its own synthetic routes remains a major challenge. The organic integration of hardware, data, and software is the core problem. While Professor E.J. Corey established retrosynthetic rules back in the 1960s, it wasn't until late 2019 that MIT News reported: "With AI's help, robotic platforms can achieve automated molecular manufacturing." This alone illustrates how difficult automated synthesis has been to realize.

However, the Chemical.AI team has accumulated years of experience in the chemical synthesis niche and achieved notable results in retrosynthesis, using proprietary algorithms to drive valuable data integration and reaction prediction while continuously improving its AI-powered automated synthesis platform to empower its R&D staff. The company has already established long-term partnerships with multiple global pharmaceutical giants and major CROs.

Chen Runze of Source Code Capital, the lead investor in this round, stated: "Source Code Capital continues to see strong potential for data science applications across drug discovery. Against the backdrop of industry specialization, chemical synthesis has become one of the most standardized steps in drug development and has already achieved preliminary digitization. Since 2005, teams have been challenging the field of intelligent chemical synthesis; by around 2018, chemical synthesis algorithms — boosted by new AI technologies — were increasingly approaching real-world deployment. The Chemical.AI team has persisted in this space for over a decade, building up rich data and algorithm expertise, and its products have gained recognition from industry-leading clients. Next, Chemical.AI is working to close the loop on intelligent chemical synthesis by combining automation with algorithms. We expect Chemical.AI to continue leading globally in this field, and believe the company can provide critical infrastructure for the emerging paradigm of data-driven small-molecule drug discovery."