ai-drug-development
(6)
Pathos AI
Pathos AI is an AI-driven biotech company building what it describes as one of the largest multimodal foundation models in oncology. By combining millions of clinical, molecular, and imaging records with proprietary AI, Pathos aims to identify the right patients for a given therapy, design smarter adaptive clinical trials, and de-risk cancer drug development. Founded in 2020 by Eric Lefkofsky and Ryan Fukushima and led since 2025 by CEO Iker Huerga, the company raised a $365 million Series D that valued it at roughly $1.6 billion.
Iker Huerga
Iker Huerga is the CEO of Pathos AI, a New York- and Chicago-based biotech building what it calls the first true AI-enabled drug development platform for oncology. A data scientist by training with more than two decades at the intersection of machine learning and cancer research, he previously served as Chief Data Scientist for Oncology R&D at AstraZeneca and as an EVP at Tempus Labs, and founded three oncology companies with two successful exits. He took the helm at Pathos in May 2025, days before the company closed a $365 million Series D that valued it at roughly $1.6 billion, with a stated mission to get the right therapies to the right patients, sooner.
Emily Nieves
Emily Nieves is the co-founder and CEO of Delineate, a Cambridge, Massachusetts startup building AI agents that read the scientific literature the way a pharmacologist does - pulling numbers out of buried plots and patents to speed up drug development. A University of Georgia biological engineer turned MIT PhD researcher, she worked on computational modeling at Pfizer and AstraZeneca before deciding the bottleneck wasn't the models but the months it took to feed them. Delineate, part of Y Combinator's Winter 2025 batch, now works with top-10 pharma companies to turn months of systematic review into weeks.
Andrei Georgescu
Andrei Georgescu is the co-founder and CEO of Vivodyne, a biotech company that grows human tissues in the lab and runs drugs through them with robots and AI before any human ever swallows a pill. A University of Pennsylvania bioengineering PhD who once sent lab-grown tissue to space with NASA, he started Vivodyne in 2020 because roughly 19 of every 20 drugs that work in animals fail in people. His pitch is blunt: test human medicine on human tissue, not on mice. In May 2025 Vivodyne raised a $40 million Series A led by Khosla Ventures to scale a 23,000-square-foot fully robotic lab in South San Francisco.
Keythera Pharmaceuticals Co., Ltd
Keythera (Suzhou) Biopharmaceuticals is a clinical-stage biotech building first-in-class small molecule drugs for cancer and autoimmune disease. Its core edge is ADMS - Affinity Detection by Mass Spectroscopy - an affinity-based high-throughput screening platform that can screen up to 250,000 compounds per day per workstation and fuses bioinformatics, structural chemistry, computer-aided drug design and AI to find and optimize drug candidates faster and at lower risk. Founded in 2020 by industry veteran Dr. Yongqi Deng, the company has built six pipelines, advanced its lead EP4 antagonist KF-0210 into the clinic, and raised roughly RMB 100M in Series A funding.
Mirador Therapeutics
Mirador Therapeutics is a San Diego precision-medicine company building first- and best-in-class therapies for immune-mediated inflammatory and fibrotic diseases. Its Mirador360 engine fuses human genetics, multi-modal patient data, AI and advanced analytics to find novel targets, design combination therapies and identify the patients most likely to respond. Founded in 2024 by the former Prometheus Biosciences leadership team, Mirador launched with more than $400 million and has since raised over $650 million total.