AI pharmaceutical startup AIPher announced the completion of an angel round of financing totaling approximately 100 million yuan (USD 14 million), led by Xianghe Capital with participation from Zhipu's Star-Lian Capital.
The company was founded by a team from Tsinghua University's Intelligent Industry Research Center, including CEO Gao Bowen, a computer science doctoral student, and Chief Scientist Lan Yanyan, the center's deputy director and chief researcher. Zhang Yaqin, founding dean of the center and a chair professor of intelligent science at Tsinghua, serves as chief scientific advisor.
AIPher has built a multi-agent system called PharmAgents that acts as a decision-making brain for pharmaceutical R&D. The system handles model invocation, task planning, experimental decision-making, and result analysis, and incorporates real experimental feedback to form a closed loop of "model, decision, experiment, data, and re-learning."
The company has published several papers on AI-driven drug discovery, including DrugCLIP, featured in Science magazine. It is positioning itself as an "AI-native pharmaceutical company" rather than just another AI tool applied to traditional pharma workflows, with a vision of rebuilding the drug discovery engine from an AI-first perspective.
Source: PitchBook China / 36Kr
