From TekinHealthHealthcare Tech Field Notes

Colorado-based Enveda raised a $311 million Series E led by Catalio Capital Management, reportedly at a $2 billion valuation. That brings its total funding to more than $845 million. Enveda uses AI to identify and rank molecules from plants and microbes as drug candidates. It has three programs in human testing: ENV-294 for atopic dermatitis and asthma, now in Phase 2a; ENV-308 for obesity; and ENV-6949, which targets TL1A for inflammatory bowel disease.

Why it's notable: This is one of the largest private rounds this year for an AI drug-discovery company. It gives Enveda funding for several mid-stage trials, a real test of whether AI-found compounds hold up in patients.

Isomorphic Labs — the Alphabet/DeepMind spinoff — is moving past selling AI tools to pharma and into developing its own drug candidates, with trials targeting oncology, cardiovascular disease, and neurodegenerative disease expected by end of 2026. This sits alongside Google's broader healthcare-AI push: the TxGemma open model family for drug discovery, an AI "co-scientist" for hypothesis generation, and a $1B Google Cloud/Merck AI partnership.

Why it's notable: A hyperscaler moving from "AI-for-pharma tooling" to "AI-native drug developer" is a signal of how far automation is creeping into clinical and therapeutic decision-making.

Chai Discovery, a San Francisco company founded in 2024, announced a $400 million Series C on July 14, 2026 at a $3.8 billion valuation. Index Ventures led the round alongside Kleiner Perkins, Sequoia Capital and Dimension, with OpenAI and Thrive Capital among the returning investors. Chai builds AI models that predict and redesign interactions between molecules. Pharmaceutical companies including Eli Lilly, Novartis and Pfizer use them in preclinical drug design. The company has now raised more than $600 million, across three rounds in under a year.

Why it's notable: This is one of the largest venture rounds for an AI drug-design company, and big drugmakers already use Chai's models. Investors are betting that AI-designed molecules will shorten early drug discovery.

At the BIO 2026 convention on June 22, 2026, Insilico Medicine and South Korea's SK Biopharmaceuticals announced a collaboration to find drug candidates for neuroinflammatory, neurodegenerative and rare neurological disorders using Insilico's Pharma.AI platform. Insilico gets up to $18 million in upfront and near-term payments. The total potential value tops $2.5 billion, almost all of it tied to future development, regulatory and sales milestones, plus single-digit royalties. SK Biopharmaceuticals, maker of the epilepsy drug Xcopri, will run late-stage development and commercialization.

Why it's notable: It adds to a run of large pharma deals for AI drug discovery, but the small upfront payment shows buyers are still paying mostly for results rather than promises.

Eli Lilly agreed on March 29, 2026 to take an exclusive worldwide license to preclinical oral drugs designed by Insilico Medicine using generative AI. The indications were not disclosed. Insilico gets $115 million upfront. It can earn up to $2.75 billion in total with development, regulatory and sales milestones, plus tiered royalties. This builds on a smaller research deal the two signed in November 2025, worth up to $100 million.

Why it's notable: It is one of the largest pharma licensing bets yet on drug candidates designed with generative AI. Still, only the $115 million upfront is guaranteed, and the licensed molecules are not yet in human trials.

On February 9, 2026, Takeda and San Diego biotech Iambic announced a multi-year deal to design small-molecule drugs with Iambic's AI models. The work starts in Takeda's oncology and gastrointestinal and inflammation programs. Iambic gets upfront, research and technology-access payments and could earn more than $1.7 billion in success-based payments plus royalties. Takeda gets access to NeuralPLexer, Iambic's model for predicting how drugs bind to proteins, along with its automated wet lab. Iambic says its lab can run a full design-make-test cycle every week.

Why it's notable: A top-20 drugmaker has placed AI-led design at the center of its small-molecule work in cancer and GI disease. It is one of several 2026 pharma deals that pay AI biotechs for platform access rather than for single drug candidates.

Insilico Medicine listed on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange on December 30, 2025. It raised HK$2.28 billion (about US$293 million) at HK$24.05 a share, which the company says was Hong Kong's largest biotech IPO of the year. Cornerstone investors included Eli Lilly, Tencent, Temasek and Schroders, and the shares rose about 25% on the first day of trading. Insilico says it has more than 30 programs, 10 with IND clearance. Its lead drug, rentosertib for idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis, has completed a Phase IIa trial in China, with results published in Nature Medicine.

Why it's notable: Insilico is one of the first companies built around AI drug discovery to go public with drugs designed by its own models already in human trials. That puts the claim that AI speeds drug development in front of public-market investors.

The FDA qualified PathAI's AIM-MASH AI Assist through its Drug Development Tool biomarker qualification program. The agency calls it the first AI drug development tool it has qualified. The cloud-based software scores liver biopsy images for steatosis, ballooning, lobular inflammation and fibrosis stage in MASH clinical trials, using the NASH Clinical Research Network system. Pathologists review and accept or reject every score. PathAI says the model was trained on more than 100,000 annotations from 59 pathologists and 5,900 biopsies from six MASH trials.

Why it's notable: In MASH trials, several pathologists usually read each biopsy by hand, and their scores often disagree. The FDA says a qualified AI reader could make that assessment more consistent and cut the time and cost of developing MASH drugs. It is also the first regulatory path for using AI to measure a trial endpoint.

San Diego-based Iambic raised more than $100 million from investors including Sequoia, Regeneron Ventures, Illumina Ventures and Mubadala. Its lead drug, IAM1363, is a HER2 inhibitor designed with the company's AI platform. At ESMO in October 2025, Iambic reported early phase 1/1b activity in heavily pretreated patients with HER2 alterations. The money will fund IAM1363, a planned combination study with Jazz's zanidatamab in HER2-positive breast cancer, and two more cancer candidates headed for the clinic.

Why it's notable: It is one of the few AI drug discovery companies with human data behind its lead drug, so it is a real test of whether AI-designed molecules do better in patients.

Eli Lilly said it is building, with NVIDIA, what it calls the most powerful supercomputer owned and operated by a pharmaceutical company: the first NVIDIA DGX SuperPOD built on DGX B300 systems, with more than 1,000 Blackwell Ultra GPUs. Lilly said it will use the system to train models on millions of experiments for drug discovery, to shorten development timelines, and for medical imaging biomarkers and manufacturing. The company plans to offer some of its models to outside biotechs through its Lilly TuneLab platform. CNBC reported the system was expected to be operational in January 2026.

Why it's notable: A top drugmaker is investing in its own large-scale AI infrastructure rather than renting it, and is offering models to smaller biotechs, a sign that computation is becoming core to how new drugs reach clinical trials.