OpenEvidence

In 2023, a group of visionary scientists and investors recognized that drug discovery remained an expensive, time-consuming process with high failure rates. Despite advances in AI, the pharmaceutical industry was still struggling to translate computational insights into viable medicines. This realization sparked the creation of Xaira Therapeutics - co-founded and incubated by ARCH Venture Partners and Foresite Labs - to build an integrated biotechnology company that would truly harness the transformative power of artificial intelligence for drug discovery. Built on the groundbreaking protein design work of Nobel Laureate Dr. David Baker and his team at the University of Washington's Institute for Protein Design, Xaira brings together advanced AI research, expansive data generation, and robust therapeutic product development. The company emerged from stealth mode in 2024 with over $1 billion in funding, ready to revolutionize how we treat disease by making predictions about the right biology to target, the best therapeutics to modulate those targets, and the patients who will benefit most. With offices in South San Francisco, Seattle, and London, Xaira is shifting drug discovery from an empirical science to a precise engineering discipline.

Chai Discovery builds AI foundation models designed to predict and reprogram biochemical molecular interactions, with the goal of transforming drug discovery into an engineering discipline. The company's founders are researchers who co-invented protein language modeling and developed state-of-the-art protein folding algorithms. Chai Discovery is backed by OpenAI, Thrive Capital, and General Catalyst, and has a partnership with Eli Lilly. The company's core platform - anchored by its Chai-1 and Chai-2 models - predicts and redesigns interactions between biochemical molecules at atomic precision. Key capabilities include drug-like antibody design against challenging targets and the generation of functional GPCR agonists with minimal screening. The platform has reported a success rate of over 85% for computationally designed molecules meeting drug-like properties, a figure that contrasts with the traditional approach of screening millions or billions of protein sequences over years at a cost of billions of dollars. Chai Discovery's technical work spans several domains: Protein language modeling and folding algorithms Computational protein and antibody design GPCR agonist design Biopharma-focused machine learning Computational prediction of biochemical interactions The company focuses on targets traditionally considered undruggable, positioning its platform as a tool capable of addressing therapeutic challenges that conventional methods cannot efficiently reach.

At Sesame, we believe that a small, focused team with a clear vision can build great things that reshape how humans interact with technology. Our interdisciplinary team brings together long-tenured experts from machine learning, hardware, software, and entertainment backgrounds, united by a shared passion for making computers lifelike. We operate out of offices in San Francisco, Bellevue, and New York, where we believe in tightly integrating hardware, software, and machine learning to create voice interfaces that are nuanced, intimate, and genuinely useful rather than annoying. Our culture emphasizes deliberate and thoughtful product design that meets users where they want to be. We're backed by world-class investors including a16z, Sequoia, Spark, and Matrix, which gives us the resources to pursue ambitious research outcomes across speech generation, personality modeling, and multimodality. Operating large GPU clusters and cultivating in-house expertise allows us to move from whiteboard to production in days, not quarters. We're looking for creative individuals who are excited about crossing the uncanny valley of voice to build computers that truly come alive.

Zuma, headquartered in Santa Monica and backed by Andreessen Horowitz and Y Combinator, builds agentic AI systems for multifamily property management. Its platform automates the repetitive layers of onsite operations - lead engagement, tour scheduling, and rent collection - while keeping human staff in the roles that require direct human interaction. The company describes its approach as augmenting property teams rather than displacing them, operating under the premise that the future of work is human and AI working together. Zuma's primary product, Kelsey, is an AI leasing assistant designed to handle the high-volume, time-intensive tasks that typically occupy onsite teams at apartment communities. The company claims to have served thousands of apartment communities and millions of residents to date. Engineering and design at Zuma work directly alongside operations staff, with product iteration driven by feedback from property managers in the field. The company characterises its development pace as rapid and its priorities as impact-led rather than prestige-led - a culture signal aimed at those who want their work deployed and tested quickly against real-world conditions.

Clarifai is a full-stack AI platform founded in 2013 by Matthew Zeiler, Ph.D. The company enables organisations to build, train, deploy, and monitor AI models across the entire machine learning lifecycle, handling unstructured data in the form of images, video, text, and audio. Its platform spans data preparation, model training, MLops, and production deployment, with edge deployment supported through its Local Runners feature and large-scale compute managed via AI Compute Orchestration. The platform serves over 400,000 users across 170+ countries and provides access to more than one million AI models, delivering billions of predictions. On the infrastructure side, Clarifai has benchmarked throughput of 544 tokens per second using the GPT-OSS-120B model. Clients include Amazon, Siemens, NVIDIA, Canva, Vimeo, and OpenTable. The company has been recognised as a leader in Forrester's New Wave Computer Vision report. Clarifai's technical roots trace to the ImageNet 2013 competition, where it took all five top places in image classification. The company has raised $100 million in total funding, including a $60 million Series C round, with backing from Menlo Ventures, Union Square Ventures, Google Ventures, NVIDIA, and Qualcomm.

Protogon Research builds autonomous AI systems and deploys them directly into financial markets through proprietary trading. The company's stated mission is to develop the most intelligent AI systems in the world, using trading as a practical testbed for AI that genuinely understands the world - rather than one that simply replicates human behaviour or produces superficial outputs. Its long-term research aim is to chart a path toward superintelligence. The company was founded by Rafael Cosman, a serial entrepreneur who previously co-founded Archblock and the TrueFi DeFi protocol. Protogon Research is backed by Zelda Ventures, OVO, and StartX, and is a member of the NVIDIA Inception Program. Protogon's technical work spans machine learning, AI research, trading, and operations. The company describes its technology as original, proprietary, and defensible, and positions itself deliberately apart from traditional quantitative trading firms: the priority is building lasting, transformative AI systems rather than optimising for short-term trading profits. The team is described as highly technical, with deep expertise across its core domains.