Yoneda Labs raised $4 million from Khosla Ventures to build a foundation model for chemists to help streamline the drugmaking process.
Discover how companies are responsibly integrating AI in production. This invite-only event in SF will explore the intersection of technology and business. Find out how you can attend here. Yoneda Labs, a Y Combinator-backed startup using AI to aid drug discoveries, announced it has raised $4 million in seed funding. The round was led by Khosla Ventures and included participation from 500 Emerging Europe, 468 Capital and YC. The capital will be used to acquire the robotic automation devices needed to run chemical reactions within Yoneda's laboratory, which creates the training data for the startup's model. Founded by Michal Mgeladze-Arciuch, Daniel Vlasits and Jan Oboril, Yoneda Labs seeks to develop a foundation model for chemical manufacturing. "Whenever chemists need to make a new drug, we use AI to tell them how," Mgeladze-Arciuch explained to VentureBeat. "This enables the creation of new drugs and makes chemical manufacturing faster and cheaper." "Machine learning and generative AI models have already begun to accelerate physics-oriented fields like aerospace engineering," Jon Chu, a partner at Khosla Ventures remarked in a statement. "Chemistry will be no different and the team at Yoneda Labs has a novel approach to creating a foundation model for chemistry that could change the way chemicals are manufactured and improve the drug discovery process." Streamlining the drug framework process Unsurprisingly, drug creation is not an easy process, especially when trying to put two molecules together to assemble a compound. The process is difficult because "you have to figure out how to make this reaction happen, how to make molecules actually stick together," Mgeladze-Arciuch said. "You need to get the right temperature, solvent, base and all these different…