We are honored to announce that Oak is leading a $130 million Series B funding round in Chai Discovery. This investment reflects our deep conviction in the founding team and the novel technology they have built to shift the paradigm in drug discovery and design – an industry we believe could materially benefit from this technology wave.
Chai’s mission is fundamentally centered on transforming the drug design process from a bespoke and circuitous journey into a highly targeted and programmable discipline. Biopharma spends +$290B annually developing therapies. Whereas other industries have seen material efficiencies driven by technology, the biopharma industry has seen declining ROI over the past few decades as the cost of discovering new medicines has ballooned. This dynamic, along with the various economic and geopolitical headwinds the category has faced in the post-COVID era, has created a renewed sense of urgency around identifying technologies that help solve this problem. We are seeing biopharma explore and adopt new technologies at an unprecedented rate. In parallel, over the course of the last few years we’ve seen step change improvements in computational methods, which have resulted in significant breakthroughs in artificial intelligence methods for molecular design.
Chai is at the forefront of this innovation curve, and will be a driving force of change in this category. The founding team is exceptional, combining deep domain expertise and high talent density. Co-founder and CEO Josh Meier previously led AI efforts at Absci and was a lead contributor at Meta’s FAIR lab and OpenAI. Co-founder and President Jack Dent, who was a core contributor at Stripe and brings scaled engineering and software expertise to a category that is in dire need of productizing and scaling the innovations that are brought to market. Meanwhile, co-founders Matt McPartlon and Jacques Boitreaud worked on some of the earliest research breakthroughs in artificial intelligence as applied to the remaining founding team is a group of highly capable, deeply experienced engineers that represent a level of energy and talent that is unparalleled.
Early progress from the team is truly remarkable. What started as an open source molecular structure prediction model (Chai-1) in late 2024 has evolved into a de novo zero shot antibody design engine (Chai-2) by summer of 2025, with additional studies this fall demonstrating that 86% of these designs had characteristics in-line with therapeutics that could be further developed. These are accomplishments that the industry thought were years away from being solved, and not only accelerate the development of novel therapies but also unlock the opportunity to explore new targets that were previously hard to drug. 2025 was the year of research breakthroughs, and 2026 will be the year of deployment at unprecedented scale and speed across the biopharma industry.
Seeing this rate of progress gives us conviction that drug development is at an inflection point, and that the Chai team will continue to push the boundaries on what is possible with these new technologies. Oak is thrilled to be partnering with Chai and excited to see what the future holds as we enter this brave new world of engineering new medicines.