Excelsior Sciences, a company developing a new form of chemistry that machines can do and AI can use to enable closed-loop drug discovery, today announced it has raised $95 million to accelerate its mission to reinvent the process of discovering and manufacturing small molecules.
The financing includes a $70 million Series A, co-led by Deerfield Management, Khosla Ventures, and Sofinnova Partners, as well as a $25 million grant from New York’s Empire State Development. Other participants include Cornucopian Capital, Eli Lilly and Company, Illinois Ventures, and the leading academic institution, MIT.
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Small molecules, the class of chemical matter primarily built from carbon-carbon bonds, perform countless essential functions in our lives: they are central to our life-saving drugs, manufacturing materials, veterinary and agricultural products, and much more. While AI has the potential to transform these fields, it requires the ability to make and test new small molecules in multiple assays fast enough to feed data-hungry algorithms.
Earlier attempts to automate chemistry have failed because they replicate the traditional artisanal approach to chemical synthesis. By contrast, Excelsior Sciences has created a proprietary form of chemistry that machines can do. At the heart of this innovation are smart bloccs—automated synthesis-friendly chemical building blocks that enable iterative carbon–carbon bond formation. Smart bloccs serve as a modular chemical “language,” allowing AI to derive novel insights and guide discovery in closed-loop learning systems.
“Drug discovery and manufacturing are at a crossroads in the West. To stay competitive, we must discover and develop better medicines—faster. This can only be achieved through automated synthesis platforms capable of rapidly producing purified compounds and testing them across multiple assays simultaneously—generating the rich data AI needs to cut years off traditional discovery timelines,”
“Our proprietary smart bloccs platform is the first system to seamlessly integrate discovery and scale-up chemistry, enabling the reshoring of drug discovery and manufacturing. We are starting with drug discovery but will work across multiple sectors.”
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