YC-Backed Yoneda Labs Raises $4 Million Seed Led by Khosla Ventures to Build Foundation Model for Chemists
26 Abril 2024 - 1:00PM
Business Wire
Yoneda Labs, the Y Combinator startup building a foundation
model for chemists working in drug discovery, today announced it
has raised $4 million in seed capital from Khosla Ventures, 500
Emerging Europe, 468 Capital, Fellows Fund, and Y Combinator.
More than 400,000 chemists are working on chemical manufacturing
around the world. While scientists have begun to leverage AI in the
discovery and design of drugs, the chemists whose job it is to
synthesize the drugs are forced to run trials in wet labs without
much, if any, automation, simulation tools, or other computational
support. As a result, the pharmaceutical and chemical manufacturing
industries waste billions of dollars on failed chemical experiments
each year.
“When a chemist wants to couple two molecules together, they are
left to old-school literature search and trial-and-error methods in
a lab,” said Michal Mgeladze-Arciuch, founder and CEO of Yoneda
Labs. “At Yoneda, our vision is to build a foundation AI model that
analyzes and predicts what will happen before a chemist has to run
their experiment. This would increase their productivity by an
order of magnitude and potentially enable the creation of new drugs
that isn’t currently possible to do cost-effectively at scale.”
"Machine learning and generative AI models have already begun to
accelerate physics-oriented fields like aerospace engineering,”
said Jon Chu, partner at Khosla Ventures. “Chemistry will be no
different and the team at Yoneda Labs has a novel approach to
creating a foundation model for chemistry that could change the way
chemicals are manufactured and improve the drug discovery
process."
Founding Team
Yoneda Labs was founded by a group from the University of
Cambridge with backgrounds in chemistry, robotics, and machine
learning. The idea for Yoneda Labs was born when one of the
founders, Jan Oboril, was working on drug development at a major
pharmaceutical company. He felt he wasted hundreds of hours running
trials in the lab that could be replaced with machine learning
algorithms that could run the same experiments in silico.
After joining forces with co-founders Michal Mgeladze-Arciuch,
who worked on machine learning algorithms at Jane Street and
researched large AI models at UC Berkeley, and Daniel Vlasits, who
won an international robotics competition, the team built an
initial prototype that improved Jan’s process in the lab and was
accepted to Y Combinator.
During their time at YC, the team identified 20,000 chemical
reactions to generate proprietary data for their foundation model.
In a small-scale trial, the models suggested good conditions in 95%
of cases, a stark improvement to the industry standard in which the
majority of the experiments fail.
With this funding, they plan to build out a robotics lab capable
of running experiments on the remaining 20,000 reactions to
continue training the first-ever generalizable AI model for
chemists. Later this year, they plan to be able to run and analyze
200 experiments a day, the equivalent output of roughly 20
full-time chemists.
About Yoneda Labs
Yoneda Labs is building the world’s first foundation AI model
for chemical manufacturing. The company was founded by Michal
Mgeladze-Arciuch, Jan Oboril, and Daniel Vlasits, who met at the
University of Cambridge and identified an opportunity to bring
machine learning to outdated pharmaceutical practices.
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Michal Mgeladze-Arciuch michal@yonedalabs.com +1 415 527
0498