China is seeing a fresh fundraising boom for artificial intelligence-powered drug developers, with start-ups including a ByteDance spin-off raising hundreds of millions of dollars this week as investors rush to back domestic challengers to Anthropic and Isomorphic Labs.
Anew Labs, a Shanghai-based AI drug discovery firm and former unit of Chinese tech giant ByteDance, has raised US$290 million at a valuation of US$1.5 billion, according to an informed source.
Investors included prominent venture capital firms such as HSG – formerly Sequoia China – IDG Capital and 5Y Capital, the source said, with ByteDance maintaining a 56 per cent stake.
Anew Labs, which did not immediately respond to a request for comment, operates a range of AI models for biomolecular structure prediction and design. They include AnewFold, its in-house foundation model, and Protenix, an open-source reproduction of AlphaFold 3, the most advanced biomolecular prediction AI model from Google DeepMind and its Isomorphic Labs spin-off.
The Chinese company said on its website that it has four drugs in its development pipeline, including an oral small-molecule drug for immunological diseases. On Thursday it launched its AnewDDE agentic platform, which it said was designed to address “fragmented” AI workflows in drug discovery.
AI’s role in drug design is advancing rapidly. Danish pharmaceutical giant Novo, formerly Novo Nordisk, announced a partnership with Anthropic on Wednesday, saying it would use the US AI firm’s models and its Claude Science platform to accelerate the discovery and development of new medicines.
Anthropic said in June that its Mythos 5 model, only available to selected partners, made aspects of the drug design process around 10 times faster. The company said last month that its Claude Mythos Preview and Opus 4.8 models had designed protein binders from scratch that succeeded against 14 of 15 targets.
Start-ups in China have ramped up their fundraising efforts.
Nutshell Therapeutics, a Shanghai-based biotech firm focused on developing small molecule drugs with AI, said on Tuesday that it had raised tens of millions of US dollars in a C+ round, with backers including Citic Capital, Decheng Capital and state-backed Fortune Venture Capital.
With nearly 20 planned drugs in its pipeline, the company’s lead programme targeting tumours was advancing through phase one and two clinical trials in the United States and China, it said on its website.
Beijing-based AI drug discovery firm AIPher, started in July and incubated by Tsinghua University’s Institute for AI Industry Research, said this week that it had completed an angel round of financing worth about 100 million yuan (US$14.9 million).
The start-up’s fastest-progressing pipeline, targeting attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, is in the pre-preclinical candidate stage, according to an article published on its official WeChat account on Monday. -- SOUTH CHINA MORNING POST
