Synfini gets $8.9M to accelerate drug discovery with AI – News

Drug discovery startup Synfini Inc. said today it has closed on an $8.9 million expansion funding round led by JSL Health Capital, bringing its total amount raised to date to $53 million.

The company has made a name for itself by combining neuro-symbolic artificial intelligence with physical and virtual chemistry. It has put vast proprietary chemistry dataset and robotic automation into a single platform that helps pharmaceutical researchers develop novel molecular compounds as drug candidates.

Its flagship platform is called AI Cloud Foundry, and that combination of technologies allows it to accelerate dramatically the discovery of small molecules and their synthesis. By merging physical and virtual chemistry processes within a single, unified workflow, it can also significantly reduce the costs associated with creating promising new compounds.

With its platform, Synfini says, it can eliminate traditional bottlenecks in the drug discovery process by speeding up target selection, compound design and synthesis. It does this by aggregating those processes into one agile and highly-integrated workflow that displaces traditional chemistry techniques. It accelerates the discovery process by generating and optimizing novel compounds with the desired properties of drug designers, before leveraging AI and chemist-designed features to expedite and streamline the planning and synthesis of those new molecules.

Synfini has a lot of pedigree and a lot of promise, having been spun out by the Silicon Valley-based nonprofit scientific research institute SRI International in September 2023. It began life as an internal SRI project several years prior to that, backed in part by the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.

SRI is a prestigious 75-year-old institute that conducts secret research on behalf of various U.S. government agencies. It has long been influential in Silicon Valley, having forged close ties with many of its top venture capital firms and largest technology companies.

It previously gave birth to initiatives such as the Department of Defense’s Advanced Research Projects Agency Network, known as ARPANET, which later became the public internet. It has also played a key role in the development of wireless networks, ultrasound and various other critical technologies now used globally in the robotics, satellite, medical device and drug discovery industries.

Since spinning out from SRI in 2023, Synfini says it has validated its novel approach to drug discovery via a number of commercial and strategic partnerships. According to its Chief Executive Officer Doug Donzelli, the money from today’s round will be used to expand on those initiatives and scale its operations.

“We’re building the next generation of drug discovery infrastructure,” Donzelli said. “This funding enables us to move faster, go broader with our platform, and deepen our relationships with both biotech innovators and large pharma.”

JSL Health joins earlier investors including SRI Ventures, WERU Investments, Ferocity Ventures, High Water Venture Partners, Foothill Ventures, Trust Ventures, Gaingels and Mana Ventures in backing Synfini.

Lekan Wang, a managing partner at JSL, made it clear why he’s willing to do so, explaining it’s rare to see a startup emerge that’s so fully formed at such an early stage in its life. That’s partly due to the years of research done at SRI, he said, where its founders created a fully functional medicinal chemistry AI platform that can demonstrably reduce molecule iteration lifecycles from months to a matter of days.

“Project planning, property prediction, reaction routes and synthesis are all included and fully integrated within Synfini’s chemistry operating system that’s built with chemists and biologists in mind,” Wang explained. “This is true American innovation and promises to dramatically increase drug pipeline velocity from hit to human trials.”

Synfini also plans to expand its small team, and will look to add new hires in specific scientific and engineering roles and grow its commercial partnerships in areas such as G protein-coupled receptor-targeted therapeutics and precision oncology.

Image: Synfini