The “AI+ Healthcare” wave is making waves again! The 6-month-old company received investment from OpenAI and Thrive Capital

The Zhitong Finance App learned that Chai Discovery, an artificial intelligence drug development startup founded six months ago, has raised close to 30 million US dollars from Thrive Capital, the world's top venture capital company, and OpenAI, a famous AI leader, and plans to use this capital to fully integrate large-scale artificial intelligence models with biomedical research and development. This investment led by Thrive Capital and OpenAI means that the “AI+ Healthcare” wave has once again set off huge waves. Previously, several startups in the field of artificial intelligence drug development announced breakthrough AI models and received strong support from many venture capital giants, which means that global capital and technology companies are very optimistic about the full integration of artificial intelligence into the medical field, which is expected to drastically reduce the product innovation cycle and comprehensively accelerate the progress of modern medicine.

According to information, Chai Discovery has developed an exclusive cutting-edge artificial intelligence-based model that can predict the structure of biochemical molecules and reprogram their interactions. This process is a core technical part of developing new drugs. “We want to use AI to transform biomedicine from science to engineering,” Joshua Mayer, co-founder and CEO of the startup, said in an interview.

The company's new round of seed funding was led by venture capital giant Thrive Capital, and Dimension Capital also participated. After experiencing this financing deal, Chai Discovery, a startup that was only six months old, was valued at around $150 million.

In recent years, the potential of big models of artificial intelligence to accelerate drug discovery has aroused extreme excitement in the capital market. In 2022, the AlphaFold tool developed by Google DeepMind amazed the entire scientific community with its powerful ability to predict the structure of millions of proteins. Recently, in June, EvolutionaryScale launched a large artificial intelligence model capable of generating novel proteins, and received up to $142 million in seed funding.

In terms of medical diagnosis, artificial intelligence models may also play an extremely important role in the future. The French startup BiOptimus, which focuses on fully integrating cutting-edge AI technology with medical science and biotechnology, recently released a new artificial intelligence model. This latest AI model will comprehensively help the research process of various complex diseases and assist doctors in speeding up the diagnosis efficiency of various diseases. The Paris-based company said in a statement that the newly launched AI model called “h-optimus-0” can perform extremely complex medical diagnostic tasks, including accurately identifying cancer cells and detecting genetic abnormalities in tumors.

On Monday, Chai Discovery released the first open source molecular structure model, Chai-1, with a technical analysis report comparing the performance of this large model with AlphaFold and eSM3, which was developed by EvolutionaryScale. Joshua Mayer said that in terms of benchmarking test data, Chai Discovery's model is significantly better.

He said, “We saw a 10% to 20% increase in the success rate when we applied it to solve specific biological problems.” “For example, when we compared to AlphaFold, we found that the large AI models we developed consistently performed better on detailed tasks critical to drug discovery.”

According to information, prior to officially joining Chai, Mayer was the chief artificial intelligence technology officer of biotech company Absci Corp., and worked briefly as a technical researcher at tech giant Meta Platforms Inc., and ChatGPT developer OpenAI. In March of this year, he co-founded an AI drug discovery startup with Jack Dante and others. Previously, Dante was a technical engineer at payment giant Stripe. Meyer said that up to now, Chai Discovery has fewer than 10 employees, but it has attracted top talent from technology companies such as OpenAI, Google, and Meta.

Dent said that Chai Discovery's first big model will be free and open source, and there are no specific plans to commercialize its technology yet.

According to PitchBook statistics, in 2023, venture capital firms invested nearly $30 billion in innovative drug development startups. For Chai Discovery, competition comes not only from other startups focusing on AI drug development, but also from tech giants like Google. Google management is closely watching what its AI director Demis Hassabis says could be worth more than $100 billion.

“This space seems big enough to accommodate everyone.” Myles Grimshaw, a partner at Thrive Capital, said he is responsible for leading this round of investment in Chai Discovery. “One of the important things about working in this field is that making one thing better is very profitable in itself.”

A “golden track” certified by the “Godfather of AI”! “AI+ Healthcare” is the segment that Nvidia is most concerned about

At the helm of Nvidia, Hwang In-hoon, the “Godfather of AI,” has more than once called “AI+ medical science/biology” “the next amazing revolution” in the field of global technology in various public forums. He even said at a recent conference that the era where everyone had to learn computers is over; biology and medicine are the future of humanity.

The application of AI in the medical field has made significant progress, particularly in drug discovery, gene editing, disease diagnosis, patient monitoring, and medical image analysis. For example, Nvidia has provided powerful computing hardware support and AI software tool support for the medical field through its BioNemo cloud service and other AI platforms with high computing power support, speeding up the process of drug development and disease diagnosis and treatment. And behind technologies such as drug discovery and medical imaging incorporating AI models, it is probably inseparable from Nvidia GPUs and the Nvidia CUDA software ecosystem to provide strong computing power support.

Statistics show that in the past two years, Nvidia's venture capital division invested a significant portion of its capital in biotechnology and drug development — in 2023 alone, Nvidia invested in 8 biotech startups focused on drug development.

The medical technology behind the AI model is probably inseparable from the strong artificial intelligence computing power support provided by the “Nvidia High Performance AI GPU+CUDA Ecosystem Platform”. Nvidia not only provides GPU hardware, but also provides a complete set of supporting acceleration software tools and libraries to support the development model of medical integrated AI technology.

Nvidia AI GPUs are equipped with CUDA acceleration toolsets and AI software development tools to not only comprehensively accelerate research in fields such as medical image processing, innovative drug discovery, protein structure prediction, and gene sequence analysis, but also support the efficient operation of extremely complex algorithms and large models. Therefore, Nvidia's hardware and software ecosystem plays an essential role in helping the medical industry achieve more efficient and accurate diagnosis and treatment plans. From the perspective of large-scale AI models at the bottom of the medical industry, Nvidia AI GPU+CUDA can be described as the preferred software and hardware collaboration platform for training the full integration of the medical field and AI models. These large models are used in the medical field for various applications from disease diagnosis to treatment recommendations.

According to GMI Research's latest research report, the healthcare market value incorporating AI technology is only about US$10.4 billion in 2022, and is expected to reach US$189.9 billion by 2030, with a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 43.7% during this period. GMI Research said that when analyzing extremely recurrent medical data, AI can often perform tasks in a shorter time and at a lower cost, thereby greatly optimizing the connection between patients, doctors, and hospital managers; and the agency expects AI to be fully applied to fields such as medical imaging and rapid diagnosis, drug discovery, medical surgery assistance robots, gene-level precision medicine, drug simulation and screening, and protein structure prediction to drastically reduce the product innovation cycle and comprehensively improve the accuracy and coverage of modern medicine within the same time A wider range of patients.

According to the latest research report from Markets And Markets, the healthcare market value incorporating AI technology is expected to be only about US$20.9 billion in 2024, and is expected to reach US$148.4 billion in 2029. The compound annual growth rate (CAGR) during this period is as high as 48.1%. The huge increase is mainly based on the rapidly growing demand potential market for breakthrough artificial intelligence technology in increasingly accurate genomics, innovative drug discovery, medical system imaging and medical diagnosis, and a significant increase in nurse care High efficiency in working and handling doctor-patient communication work promotes large-scale deployment of AI systems in hospitals.