Chai Discovery, an innovative AI startup founded in 2024, is rapidly gaining attention in the pharmaceutical industry for its groundbreaking approach to drug development. Founders Josh Meier, Jack Dent, Matthew McPartlon, and Jacques Boitreaud started the company with a simple but mighty mission. Their goal is to completely revolutionize proteomics—the study of proteins—through the latest artificial intelligence.
Chai’s roots go back to conversations that started almost six years ago. Meier, Dent and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman were instrumental behind-the-scenes in those discussions. These discussions led to what would turn out to be a crucial partnership. OpenAI became one of Chai’s very first seed investors, giving vital early assistance to the jackanapes company.
Chai’s focus is on manufacturing antibodies, the proteins our bodies produce to fight off diseases and keep us healthy. To make this possible, the Chai Energy startup has created a specially tailored algorithm named Chai-2 that serves this purpose. Meier’s prior experience at OpenAI and his work building ESM1—the first transformer protein-language model over at Facebook—provided him with invaluable expertise. He carried this deep well of industry knowledge with him to Chai.
Though technically based in OpenAI’s offices in San Francisco’s Mission district, Meier and Dent started building an early foundation for Chai. The startup’s recent announcement of a partnership with pharma giant Eli Lilly to co-develop AI tools is a big indicator of that. As part of this collaboration, Eli Lilly will leverage Chai’s software to accelerate development of new medicines. The goal of this partnership is to supplement Chai’s generative design models with Eli Lilly’s deep biologics expertise and proprietary data.
The goal of this collaboration is ambitious: to push the boundaries of how AI can design better molecules from the outset.…not just for their patients but for everyone.” In her testimony, Eli Lilly’s Aliza Apple emphasized the necessity of this effort, saying that
“By combining Chai’s generative design models with Lilly’s deep biologics expertise and proprietary data, we intend to push the frontier of how AI can design better molecules from the outset, with the ultimate goal to help accelerate the development of innovative medicines for patients.”
Chai’s growth trajectory has been impressive. In December 2025, Chai announced the close of its Series B funding round. They went on to raise over $130 million and were recently valued at a stellar $1.3 billion funding valuation. General Catalyst, one of Chai’s major backers, expressed confidence in the startup’s potential impact on drug discovery.
Viboch, also of General Catalyst, remarked on the value that implementation of Chai’s innovations would provide to biopharma companies. He cautioned that drug candidates require further testing and clinical trials. Countering those fears, he stressed the tremendous benefits that artificial intelligence could bring to drug development. Viboch explained,
“Companies will still need to take drug candidates through testing and clinical trials, but we believe there’ll be significant advantages to those who adopt these technologies—not just in compressing discovery timelines but also in unlocking classes of medicines that have historically been difficult to develop.”
The founders of Chai didn’t just dream of starting a proteomics company—that idea came to them around the campfire with Altman. Their promise to creating special solutions is shown in Dent’s claim that,
“Every line of code in our codebase is homegrown. We’re not taking LLMs off the shelf that are in the open source ecosystem and fine-tuning them. These are highly custom architectures.”
With its sights set high, Chai seeks to see first-in-class medicines in clinical trials by the end of 2027. The startup’s aggressive timeline is an indicator of the confidence it has in its technology and in-house development capabilities.
By working together with Chai, they will be the ones to unlock the most competitive advantage. Viboch emphasized this point, stating,
“We believe the biopharma companies that move the most quickly to partner with companies like Chai will be the first to get molecules into the clinic and will make medicines that matter.”