A medical doctor who studied physics, a physicist who ran a biology lab, a professor who learned to close deals. Today he is the Chief Business Officer of DeepCure.
Most executives can point to the moment they chose a lane. Han Lim seems to have refused. He collected a medical degree, then a doctorate in a different field, then a physics postdoc, then a decade running a biology lab - and only after all of that did he decide the most interesting experiment was a company.
As Chief Business Officer of DeepCure, he owns the parts of an AI drug discovery company that do not fit neatly in a lab notebook: business development, portfolio planning, and corporate strategy. DeepCure is building an end-to-end automated platform meant to accelerate and personalize small molecule drug discovery. The ingredients are unusual - artificial intelligence, a virtual library of roughly a quintillion synthesizable compounds, robotic synthesis, and automated assays. Lim's job is to turn that machinery into partnerships, pipeline, and money.
16+ years leading teams across business development, strategy, and research.
Helped build the first generation of AI drug discovery companies - before the category had a name.
Trained as physician, physicist, and biologist before crossing into industry.
DeepCure's bet is that drug discovery should be a closed loop. AI proposes molecules. A virtual library - on the order of a quintillion synthesizable compounds - gives the AI somewhere to look. Robots make the promising candidates. Automated assays test them. The results feed back into the model. Repeat, faster than a human team could.
That loop is the science. Lim runs the half that decides which diseases the loop points at, which pharma companies sit at the table, and how the capital arrives. In April 2024 DeepCure closed a $24.6M Series A-1 led by IAG Capital Partners, pushing total financing past $72M and aiming the company's immunology and inflammation pipeline toward clinical trials.
One of the pioneers in establishing the first generation of AI drug discovery companies.
- how DeepCure described him on day oneBefore DeepCure, Lim was Chief Business Officer at Atomwise, one of the earliest companies to point machine learning at the problem of finding drugs. He launched the company's internal drug discovery pipeline and was instrumental in growing it through two rounds of financing totaling $168M.
He also did the unglamorous, compounding work of partnerships. He secured AI drug discovery deals with names like Eli Lilly and Charles River Laboratories, and built out a global program of more than 500 academic research projects. It is the kind of resume that explains why a young company hands you the title Chief Business Officer.
Then came the decade at UC Berkeley, where Lim ran a lab focused on systems biology and bioengineering and published in journals including Nature, Nature Genetics, and PNAS. Most people would call that a career. He treated it as a prologue.