AI drug discovery startups have raised $32.6B across 621 tracked deals since January 2024, and the money is pooling into fewer hands every half-year. Deal count has fallen in each of the last three six-month periods, from 134 in the first half of 2024 to 112 in the first half of 2026, while dollar volume in the most recent half matched the 2024 peak. Fewer companies are getting funded, and the ones that do are getting more.
On this page
- How AI Drug Discovery Money Moved: $32.6B Since 2024
- Top AI Drug Discovery Startups by Funding
- AI-Native vs AI-Augmented: How These Startups Use AI Differently
- Where AI Drug Discovery Funding Is Concentrated
- From Seed to Series D: The Funding Pipeline for Pharma AI
- Key Investors Backing AI Drug Discovery
- FAQ: AI Drug Discovery Startups
- Methodology
How AI Drug Discovery Money Moved: $32.6B Since 2024
Getting one drug to approval costs its sponsor hundreds of millions of dollars, and most of that money goes on candidates that never make it. That arithmetic is why capital keeps flowing to any platform claiming it can shorten the earliest stage of the pipeline, where a failure is cheapest to catch.
The Bot Memo database holds 621 AI drug discovery deals since January 2024: 274 in 2024 worth $14.1B, 235 in 2025 worth $10.8B, and 112 in the first half of 2026 worth $7.7B. Line the half-years up and the shape is clear.
| Period | Deals | Funding |
|---|---|---|
| H1 2024 | 134 | $7.72B |
| H1 2025 | 124 | $5.94B |
| H1 2026 | 112 | $7.73B |
Deal count has dropped 16% across two years while the dollars came back. Most of that recovery traces to a single round. Isomorphic Labs raised $2.1B in May 2026, 27% of everything committed to the segment in the first half of the year. Strip it out and H1 2026 lands at $5.6B, below both prior first halves.
The median round has barely moved: $23.4M in 2024, $21.6M in 2025, $23.4M in 2026. So the middle of the market is flat while the top stretches away from it. Mean round size across the 579 disclosed rounds is $56.4M against a median of $22.8M, and that gap is where the concentration shows up.
Xaira Therapeutics set the pattern in April 2024, launching with $1B in Series A funding, two and a half times the next-largest Series A in this set. A first round at that scale is no longer a freak event. Of the 166 disclosed Series A rounds here, 30 cleared $100M and nine cleared $200M.
Top AI Drug Discovery Startups by Funding
The top 20, ranked by largest single disclosed round in the Bot Memo database. Only companies whose primary market is health and biotech are included, which keeps out broad enterprise AI platforms that run a drug discovery line alongside three other businesses.
| Rank | Company | Largest Round | Stage | HQ | Lead Investors |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Isomorphic Labs | $2.1B | Series B | London | Thrive Capital |
| 2 | Xaira Therapeutics | $1.0B | Series A | South San Francisco | ARCH Venture Partners |
| 3 | Earendil Labs | $787M | Not disclosed | Beijing | Dimension Capital, DST Global, Sanofi |
| 4 | NewLimit | $435M | Series C | South San Francisco | Founders Fund |
| 5 | Mirador Therapeutics | $400M | Series A | San Diego | ARCH Venture Partners |
| 6 | Kailera Therapeutics | $400M | Series A | Waltham | Atlas Venture, Bain Capital Life Sciences, RTW Investments |
| 7 | Formation Bio | $372M | Series D | New York | Andreessen Horowitz |
| 8 | Pathos AI | $365M | Series D | Chicago | Not disclosed |
| 9 | Eikon Therapeutics | $350.7M | Series D | Millbrae | Andreessen Horowitz Bio + Health |
| 10 | Lila Sciences | $350M | Series A | Cambridge | Braidwell, Collective Global |
| 11 | Ollin Biosciences | $330M | Series B | Austin | TCGX, ARCH Venture Partners |
| 12 | Metsera | $290M | Series A | New York | ARCH Venture Partners |
| 13 | Cardurion Pharmaceuticals | $260M | Series B | Burlington | Ascenta Capital |
| 14 | Alumis | $259M | Series C | South San Francisco | Foresite Capital |
| 15 | Anagram Therapeutics | $250M | Not disclosed | Natick | Blackstone Life Sciences |
| 16 | AltruBio | $225M | Series B | San Francisco | BVF Partners |
| 17 | Seaport Therapeutics | $225M | Series B | Boston | General Atlantic |
| 18 | Dispatch Bio | $216M | Series A | Philadelphia | ARCH Venture Partners, Parker Institute for Cancer Immunotherapy |
| 19 | ITM | $214M | Growth | Munich | Temasek |
| 20 | Odyssey Therapeutics | $213M | Series D | Boston | Not disclosed |
Source: Bot Memo analysis of 621 AI drug discovery deals, January 2024 to June 2026.
Three of these companies are no longer private. Pfizer completed its acquisition of Metsera on November 13, 2025. Alumis has traded on Nasdaq since July 2024, and Odyssey Therapeutics went public in May 2026. Each round in the table was raised while the company was still private.
Isomorphic Labs, the Alphabet-backed drug design company founded by DeepMind co-founder Demis Hassabis, took its $2.1B round from Thrive Capital in May 2026, with Alphabet, GV, MGX, Temasek and CapitalG alongside. The company builds on AlphaFold to design new therapeutics and has partnerships with Eli Lilly and Novartis worth up to $3B in milestone payments.
Earendil Labs is the outlier in the top five. Delaware-incorporated with its research operation in Beijing, it raised $787M in March 2026 from a syndicate including Dimension Capital, DST Global and Sanofi. It is the largest single financing in the set that carries no Series label at all.
Kailera Therapeutics launched with $400M in Series A funding co-led by Atlas Venture, Bain Capital Life Sciences and RTW Investments to develop next-generation obesity and metabolic therapies from Waltham, MA. Metsera, also working on metabolic disease, raised $290M in Series A from ARCH Venture Partners and a $215M Series B led by Wellington Management before Pfizer bought it.
Several AI drug discovery companies that come up often sit below the $213M cutoff for this table. Abcuro raised $200M in Series C to advance a treatment for inclusion body myositis, a rare disease with no approved therapy. BioAge Labs took $170M in Series D from Richmond, CA. Chai Discovery raised $130M in Series B for protein design models from San Francisco, Insilico Medicine $110M from Hong Kong, and Iambic Therapeutics $100M in Series C from San Diego. All five run AI-driven drug discovery programs; none has yet raised at the scale of the top 20.
For the wider picture beyond drug discovery, our ranking of the top AI healthcare startups covers diagnostics, clinical operations and care delivery.
AI-Native vs AI-Augmented: How These Startups Use AI Differently
Not every company on this list uses artificial intelligence the same way, and the difference matters for anyone judging long-term defensibility.
AI-native companies build the whole drug discovery platform around generative AI models. The work splits into two halves that traditional drug discovery treats as separate disciplines: target discovery, meaning which protein in which disease biology is worth attacking, and molecule design, meaning what to attack it with. Isomorphic Labs runs both computationally before any wet lab work begins. Its AI model predicts protein structures and molecular interactions, and de novo drug design produces candidate small molecule and biologic structures that pharmaceutical companies would spend years reaching by screening. Lila Sciences pushes into the next step, pairing machine learning models with autonomous labs and robotics so experimental validation runs without a person at the bench.
Formation Bio is the clearest case of the AI-native pharma model. It acquires clinical-stage drug candidates and runs development through custom models built with OpenAI and Sanofi. Its $372M Series D came from Andreessen Horowitz, with Sanofi also participating.
AI-augmented companies apply AI tools to specific steps rather than rebuilding the drug discovery process. Seaport Therapeutics and Cardurion Pharmaceuticals both fall here, using machine learning to narrow a chemical series that chemists then take forward. Seaport Therapeutics ($225M Series B, Boston) works on neuropsychiatric drug candidates, and Cardurion Pharmaceuticals ($260M Series B, Burlington) on cardiovascular drug targets. Neither is trying to replace medicinal chemistry, and both keep a conventional development pipeline behind the model.
Recursion Pharmaceuticals sits between the two. It merged with Exscientia, the UK drug design company, into a trans-Atlantic platform with clinical and discovery programs and partnerships with Bayer, Roche and Sanofi. Its BioHive-2 supercomputer, ranked 35th on the TOP500 at launch, processes biological data at a scale that supports both models of working.
The distinction matters at the point of exit. An AI-native company sells a proprietary platform that can generate a new drug candidate repeatedly, which is why the foundation model comparison keeps coming up in these rounds. An AI-augmented company sells the assets in its pipeline. Investors pay platform multiples for the first and asset multiples for the second, and the funding data shows which one the market believes: the AI-native names take the larger checks at every stage.
Where AI Drug Discovery Funding Is Concentrated
The United States took 350 of 621 deals (56.4%), and inside the US the money tracks the old biotech corridors rather than the software ones.
| City | Deals | Notable Companies |
|---|---|---|
| Cambridge | 61 | Lila Sciences, Clasp Therapeutics |
| San Francisco | 57 | AltruBio, Chai Discovery |
| Boston | 43 | Seaport Therapeutics, Odyssey Therapeutics |
| London | 29 | Isomorphic Labs, Latent Labs |
| New York City | 24 | Formation Bio, Metsera |
| San Diego | 20 | Mirador Therapeutics, Crystalys Therapeutics |
| Paris | 14 | Bionyra Pharma, Bioptimus |
| Seattle | 13 | Outpace Bio, ProfoundBio |
| Shanghai | 11 | Oricell Therapeutics, OTR Therapeutics |
Source: Bot Memo analysis of 621 AI drug discovery deals, January 2024 to June 2026
Cambridge leads at 61 deals, a count that combines the Massachusetts cluster anchored by MIT, Harvard and the Broad Institute with the UK Cambridge drug discovery cluster. The San Francisco row above already folds in South San Francisco. Add Palo Alto, Menlo Park, Redwood City and the rest of the peninsula and the Bay Area reaches 100 deals, roughly 1.6 times Cambridge and the largest single cluster in the set.
The United Kingdom holds second place globally with 89 deals (14.3%), led by London’s 29 and the Oxford-Cambridge corridor. France (22), Germany (18), China (18) and Switzerland (17) follow. China’s presence is understated by the count alone, since Earendil Labs runs the third-largest financing in the set out of Beijing under a Delaware holding company.
From Seed to Series D: The Funding Pipeline for Pharma AI
Series A leads at 169 deals (27.2%), with Seed close behind at 153 (24.6%). Together they account for slightly more than half of every round in the segment.
| Stage | Deals | Share |
|---|---|---|
| Series A | 169 | 27.2% |
| Seed | 153 | 24.6% |
| Series B | 88 | 14.2% |
| Not disclosed | 81 | 13.0% |
| Series C | 35 | 5.6% |
| Pre-Seed | 30 | 4.8% |
| Growth | 28 | 4.5% |
| Series D | 15 | 2.4% |
| Debt | 13 | 2.1% |
| Series E | 5 | 0.8% |
| Strategic | 2 | 0.3% |
| Convertible | 2 | 0.3% |
Source: Bot Memo analysis of 621 AI drug discovery deals, January 2024 to June 2026. The “not disclosed” row covers rounds announced without a stage label: 64 carried no label at all, 10 were grants, and the rest were equity, bridge or pre-IPO financings.
The Series A concentration is where the sector’s economics show up. Median Series A in this set is $35.5M against a $9.0M median seed, so the step from seed to A is roughly a 4x jump, far steeper than software. A seed round buys enough to validate a drug discovery platform and nominate a handful of drug targets. What comes next costs Series A money whether the discovery engine works or not: laboratory infrastructure, a medicinal chemistry team, animal studies, and the regulatory work to reach a Phase 1 clinical trial. That is why so few companies stall between the two stages and so many raise large. Crystalys Therapeutics raised $205M in Series A from Novo Holdings, SR One and Catalys Pacific to advance gout treatments from San Diego.
The 15 Series D rounds sit at the other end: Eikon Therapeutics ($350.7M, Millbrae), Pathos AI ($365M, Chicago) and Formation Bio ($372M, New York). By that point the money funds clinical development of named drug candidates rather than platform promises, and the AI-driven story matters less to the round than the trial data. For how these stage patterns compare across the rest of AI, see our breakdown of AI startups by funding stage.
Key Investors Backing AI Drug Discovery
Counted by deals participated in, the most active names are Alexandria Venture Investments (35), ARCH Venture Partners (24), OrbiMed (21), RA Capital Management (20) and Eli Lilly (20). Alexandria appears most often because it writes small checks into a wide range of rounds. ARCH is the one that keeps turning up at the front of the biggest ones.
ARCH Venture Partners led or co-led Xaira ($1B), Mirador ($400M), Metsera ($290M), Dispatch Bio ($216M, co-led with the Parker Institute for Cancer Immunotherapy) and Ollin Biosciences ($330M, co-led with TCGX). The firm raised a $3B+ thirteenth fund in 2024 with AI drug discovery as a centerpiece, and the portfolio skews to precision medicine and cancer immunotherapy.
Andreessen Horowitz came into pharma AI through its Bio + Health fund, backing Eikon Therapeutics ($350.7M Series D) for microscopy-driven discovery and Formation Bio ($372M Series D) for AI-native drug development. The pattern in both is software as the moat rather than biology alone.
Atlas Venture, Bain Capital Life Sciences and RTW Investments co-led the $400M Series A for Kailera Therapeutics, the largest first round in the metabolic disease category in this set.
Pharma companies show up as co-investors rather than acquirers in most of these rounds. Eli Lilly participated in 20, Sanofi Ventures in 14. Sanofi co-invested in Formation Bio’s Series D and in Earendil Labs, and partnered with Formation Bio on model development. For activity across every AI category, see the most active AI investors.
FAQ: AI Drug Discovery Startups
Which AI drug discovery startup has raised the most funding?
Isomorphic Labs raised $2.1B in May 2026, led by Thrive Capital, the largest single round for any AI drug discovery company in Bot Memo’s set of 621 deals. Xaira Therapeutics holds the record for a first round, at $1.0B in Series A in April 2024.
How much has been invested in AI in drug discovery?
$32.6B across 621 deals between January 2024 and June 2026. That splits into $14.1B in 2024, $10.8B in 2025 and $7.7B in the first half of 2026.
Is AI drug discovery funding growing?
Not by deal count. The number of rounds has fallen in each of the last three half-years, from 134 in H1 2024 to 124 in H1 2025 to 112 in H1 2026. Dollar volume in H1 2026 recovered to $7.7B, but $2.1B of that was a single Isomorphic Labs round.
What is the difference between AI-native and AI-augmented drug discovery?
AI-native companies such as Isomorphic Labs and Formation Bio run the whole process through models, from target identification to molecule design to trial optimization. AI-augmented companies apply machine learning to specific steps in an otherwise traditional pipeline. In this set the AI-native companies take the larger rounds, and the AI-augmented ones cluster at earlier stages.
Where are most AI drug discovery startups based?
The United States accounts for 350 of 621 deals (56.4%). Cambridge leads all cities with 61 deals, ahead of San Francisco (57) and Boston (43). The UK is the second-largest market at 89 deals, with London holding 29 of them.
Are AI drug discovery startups a good investment?
$32.6B across 621 deals since 2024 shows real institutional conviction, and Isomorphic Labs raised $2.1B in a single private round in May 2026. Set against that, deal count is falling, the median round has sat flat near $23M for three years, and the top of the market is pulling away from the middle, with a $56.4M mean against that $22.8M median. Capital is going into fewer, larger bets on platform companies rather than spreading across the sector, so the answer depends on whether you can get into the rounds at the top.
Methodology
This analysis covers 621 AI drug discovery deals tracked in the Bot Memo database from January 2024 through June 30, 2026.
Data sources: Company announcements, press releases, regulatory filings, and newsletter monitoring across 900+ sources per week.
Filters applied: Deals classified under drug discovery and development whose primary market is health and biotech. Companies frequently span several categories, including therapeutics, biotechnology, precision medicine and genetics, and each deal is counted once.
Currency: Amounts shown in USD, converted from the currency each round was announced in at a single current reference rate. ITM’s round, for example, was €188M.
Investor counts: Deal counts show the number of rounds an investor participated in, not capital deployed by that investor.
Limitations: Funding totals cover disclosed amounts only. Rounds announced without a figure are counted as deals but carry no dollar value. Companies that raised more than once appear under each round, and the ranked table uses the largest single round.
About the author
Editorial Staff
The Editorial Staff at Bot Memo is a team of writers, analysts, and AI agents dedicated to mapping the global AI startup ecosystem. Led by Chintan Zalani, the team tracks thousands of funding rounds, classifies companies across verticals, and distills it all into actionable intelligence for investors and founders.
