The round was led by the US venture capital (VC) firm General Catalyst Partners with participation from compatriot VC Greylock Partners in addition to strategic investors. Manas will use the proceeds to scale up its AI technology and drive ahead its drug pipeline programs.
Manas AI is one of many startups gunning to address the costly and risky process of drug development, with more than 90% of drug candidates failing to reach the market from the preclinical stage.
Revolutionizing drug discovery with AI
“Through the power of AI and our world-class team, we believe we can drastically reduce the time and cost it takes to bring game-changing new treatments to patients,” said Manas AI co-founder and CEO, Siddhartha Mukherjee, in a public release. He later said that, if the company’s generative chemistry models work, Manas AI aims to “replace conventional experimental methods to create medicines”.
Manas AI generates libraries of chemical compounds that could serve as a potential treatment and use AI filters to find the most promising candidates. The company then works with Microsoft’s Azure cloud computing service to simulate the drug’s interactions with targets a hundred times faster than traditional tools. It also aims to map out how drugs bind to their targets to further speed up its drug discovery efforts.
Expanding focus beyond cancer treatments
In addition to cancer, Manas AI also plans to tackle other conditions including autoimmune diseases and rare diseases.
“Amidst all the hype in AI-powered drug discovery today, Manas AI is poised to make truly practical, game-changing advances,” said Peter Lee, President of Microsoft Research, in the release.
Among Manas AI’s investors is also its co-founder Reid Hoffman, who is famous for co-founding LinkedIn.
Manas AI is not the only AI drug discovery player receiving big cash in the past weeks. The US company SandboxAQ received more than $300m in December to fuel the development of its AI offerings in drug development and other verticals. Meanwhile, Iceland-based Arctic Therapeutics raised €26.5m in a Series A round earlier this month to finance the development of treatments for dementia and inflammatory skin conditions.
This week also saw AI markets reeling after the Chinese startup Deepseek claimed to have developed models rivalling its most advanced counterparts by OpenAI and Meta at a fraction of the cost. Deepseek is deploying its offerings for use in healthcare including in personalized medicine, drug discovery and remote patient monitoring.
