Enter Xaira, with $1bn for its AI in drug discovery platform
Xaira Therapeutics co-founder Dr David Baker
Any new company wanting to make waves in applying artificial intelligence to drug discovery will need deep pockets and a top-tier science and management team – and startup Xaira Therapeutics has arrived at its launch party with both.
The San Francisco-based company has emerged from the incubators of ARCH Venture Partners and Foresite Labs with more than $1 billion in funding to develop AI technologies nurtured in the lab of co-founder David Baker, director of the UW Medicine Institute for Protein Design.
It is led by Marc Tessier-Lavigne, previously chief scientific officer at Genentech, with senior management that also includes co-founder Hetu Kamisetty – previously at Meta and former colleague of Baker at UW – as well as ex-Genentech executives Arvind Rajpal and Don Kirkpatrick.
ARCH’s managing director and co-founder Robert Nelsen noted that the financing is the largest initial funding commitment in its history, which reflects Xaira’s potential “to rethink drug discovery entirely.”
Along with the two initial backers, the round has also been joined by F-Prime, NEA, Sequoia Capital, Lux Capital, Lightspeed Venture Partners, Menlo Ventures, Two Sigma Ventures, the Parker Institute for Cancer Immunotherapy (PICI), Byers Capital, Rsquared, and SV Angel, among others.
The proposition on the table at Xaira is an advanced machine learning platform and data generation engine to power new models, backed up by the top team’s extensive therapeutics development expertise, that will be applied to “biological discovery, the design of drug-like matter, and clinical development.”
Its platform includes models for protein and antibody design, respectively called RFdiffusion and RFantibody, that were developed in Baker’s lab. Several members of the team that worked on them have joined Xaira.
“In my previous roles, I witnessed an earlier generation of technologies fundamentally change drug discovery, delivering new medicines that alleviate the burden of disease for many patients,” said Tessier-Lavigne, who has also served as president of Stanford and Rockefeller Universities.
“Now, witnessing how AI is impacting other industries and the considerable progress in applications of AI in biology, I believe we are poised for a revolution,” he added. “Xaira is in a strong position to both advance fundamental AI research and translate these advances into transformative new medicines.”
The board of directors at the company also reads like a who’s who of the biopharma sector, featuring former CEO of Johnson & Johnson Alex Gorsky as well as ex-FDA Commissioner Scott Gottlieb, now a partner at NEA.
