Chemify

The explosion in computing resources over the last decade has made it possible for the extremely complex systems of molecular biology to be simulated in high enough fidelity to begin to produce new materials, new drugs and other important substances. However even with increasingly accurate simulation, chemical development today still remains a highly complex process that requires weeks (or months) of lab effort and millions of dollars to achieve any reasonable results. Moreover, although computational chemistry promises to unlock a new wave of innovation and value, there is still no standardized platform for delivering chemistry, with most companies invested in a fragmented patchwork of various legacy technologies and no one software language to “rule them all.”

Chemify is a programmable chemistry paradigm that runs code on a standard ‘Turing complete’ hardware to make almost any material with a unique robotic system to digitally synthesize any complex organic molecule. This is the concept of ‘Chemputation’ — think computation for chemistry, meaning that a universal chemical programming language to make all of chemistry reproducible is now possible. By turning code into molecules to reproduce all of chemistry, Chemify is analogous to what transistors did for computers — with the potential to be 10–100x cheaper than even today’s state-of-the art chemistry automation. Chemify’s approach is now fully developed and today’s funding will be earmarked for commercially addressing the entire chemical manufacturing and research market, as well as the entire pharma product market, with a number of high value use cases and applications.

Our Thesis

We’re excited about Chemify’s potential to significantly reduce the workload and expense of creating complex organic molecules (for drug discovery automation etc), as well as novel materials, and to allow any company to make any known molecule or material on demand. We believe their technology could also accelerate the discovery of new high value molecules, with many potential use cases (for example the creation of mini-labs capable of making any antibiotic, retroviral, or anti-cancer medication for on-demand custom medications in remote locations). Finally, if their programming language and IDE gains traction among everyday chemists, Chemify’s approach to programmable chemistry, chemputation, could significantly reduce the noise of standards in predictive chemistry and autonomous synthesis.

We are excited to be backing Lee Cronin and the entire Chemify team on their mission to digitize chemistry. Read more about the company’s $43m financing including their recent series A here.