10x Science Raises $4.8M in Seed Funding

10x Science builds advanced AI tools to analyze proteins at the molecular level for the life sciences, starting with drug development. Its platform can provide clear, automated molecular insights in minutes, compared to traditional methods that take months and rely on manual work. With many biologic drugs under development worldwide and stricter regulatory requirements, 10x Science is creating a new category that combines AI and life sciences to accelerate research and development.

The pharmaceutical industry is developing more complex protein-based drugs, but the need for analysis is growing faster than the number of trained experts. 10x Science solves this problem with an AI system that analyzes large amounts of data, identifies molecular structures and changes, and produces clear, explainable results.

The platform is built with “deep memory,” meaning it learns from each dataset and builds a growing understanding of a customer’s molecular portfolio over time. All results are explainable and traceable, which is important for regulated work like FDA submissions. Unlike older tools that restart every time, this system improves with each analysis. With a team experienced in chemistry, biology, mass spectrometry, and AI, the company aims to create a new category in life sciences.

The company’s goal goes beyond just speeding up protein analysis. As the platform studies more molecules across different organizations, 10x Science is building a shared system of molecular knowledge for the life sciences. This creates a growing, data-driven understanding of protein therapies at a scale never before achieved.

The pharmaceutical industry holds a large amount of molecular data that has never been fully combined or used at scale. 10x Science uses AI to analyze any protein, with applications in areas like cancer, brain diseases, infectious diseases, agriculture, and basic biology research. With this funding, the company will hire founding engineers and expand partnerships with pharma and biotech companies to support these uses.

"The people building AI have historically not been life scientists, and the life scientists have not been building AI; we come from both worlds," says co-founder and CEO David Stephen Roberts. "We realized we could build something that had never existed: an AI system with the scientific depth to reason about proteins the way the best experts do, but at a speed and scale no human team can match. For the first time, we can begin to ask the question that the entire pharmaceutical industry has never been able to answer: across thousands of characterized therapeutics, what molecular patterns distinguish the drugs that work from the ones that do not"

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"AI has already made meaningful contributions to biology at the prediction layer, asking what a protein might look like based on its sequence," says co-founder and COO Andrew Reiter. "What no one has built is AI for the characterization layer, where you interpret real experimental data from real therapeutic molecules: that is the layer where drug development decisions are actually made, and it has remained painfully manual."

"This is a critical moment in pharma; the industry is looking for AI that actually works, and protein characterization is needed at every stage of the drug lifecycle, regardless of whether any single drug succeeds or fails. We're talking about the infrastructure layer of drug development," says Zoe Perret, partner at Initialized Capital. "The 10x Science founders helped build this field, and they're now showing up with a product that solves an expensive, critically important problem. There is no more credible team to do this."

"Biologics are the fastest-growing segment of the pharmaceutical industry and are the most complex to develop. Every antibody, every cell therapy, every engineered protein requires characterization at a level of detail that existing tools simply weren't designed to handle. The field has outgrown its infrastructure. That's not sustainable," says Carolyn Bertozzi, 2022 Nobel Laureate and Stanford University Professor. "I've spent my career at the intersection of chemistry and biology, trying to understand how molecules behave in living systems. The biggest constraint I see across the field, whether in academic labs or industry, is the gap between the data we can generate and the insights we can extract from it. 10x Science closes that gap."

About 10x Science

Founded in 2025 by David Stephen Roberts, Andrew Reiter, and Vishnu Tejus, 10x Science was created at Professor Carolyn Bertozzi’s Stanford University lab to build an AI-native platform for protein analysis. The founders bring strong research and startup experience, and the company develops AI models that automatically and clearly explain molecular characteristics of protein drugs for pharma companies, biotech firms, and research institutions.

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