Big Pharma is making billion-dollar bets on AI-designed drugs.

Eli Lilly, Novartis, and J&J have all partnered with Isomorphic Labs in deals worth up to billions of dollars, betting that AI can fundamentally change how medicines are discovered. And they're not alone.

GSK licensed Noetik's cancer foundation models. AstraZeneca acquired Modella AI. Lilly launched a major AI drug discovery initiative with NVIDIA.

AI is now designing molecules before any wet-lab experiment even begins. Models like AlphaFold 3, ESM3, and Chai-2 can predict and generate biological structures before a wet-lab experiment begins—reshaping how new medicines are discovered.

For pharma, the promise is enormous: faster target discovery, more efficient candidate selection, and a higher probability of finding drugs that make it to the clinic.

To understand the opportunity, we mapped 110+ startups building across the AI drug development stack, with company profiles, funding, and founder details.

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