Pfizer scientists will leverage Chai Discovery’s AI platform – including Chai-3, its most advanced model – alongside custom software, to help accelerate drug discovery research
SAN FRANCISCO–(BUSINESS WIRE)–Chai Discovery, the company engineering AI models to discover new molecules, today announced a license agreement with leading biopharmaceutical company Pfizer.
The agreement will enable Pfizer to deploy Chai’s AI platform as part of its drug discovery engine, gaining early access to the Chai-3 model as well as a custom model that leverages Pfizer’s proprietary data and is tailored to Pfizer’s workflows.
Chai Discovery builds generative AI software that can predict and reprogram the interactions between molecules, enabling scientists to design biomolecules with specific functional properties. For decades, drug discovery has been constrained by painstaking experimental cycles with uncertain outcomes. Chai’s frontier AI models can accelerate the early phases of development by designing new biomolecules from scratch, tackling hard targets, and compressing discovery loops from months or years into short sprints.
“Our work with Pfizer is about putting Chai’s software directly into the hands of one of the world’s leading drug discovery organizations,” said Joshua Meier, co-founder of Chai Discovery. “By combining Chai’s frontier AI platform with Pfizer’s scientific depth, data and discovery capabilities, we see an opportunity to expand and accelerate what is possible in biologics discovery and help Pfizer pursue targets that traditional methods have struggled to reach.”
Under the agreement, Pfizer will be among the first pharmaceutical partners to secure access to Chai’s previously undisclosed model, Chai-3.
Chai-3 shows step-change improvements in AI-driven antibody design, doubling the success rate of its predecessor and producing antibodies that meet required therapeutic standards. The model advances progress on therapeutic binding capabilities, multi-specifics, molecules that bind hard-to-drug targets and improved generalization capabilities.
This update builds on 2025 model release Chai-2, the first zero-shot antibody design platform to achieve double-digit experimental hit rates and design molecules with drug-like properties – a 100-fold improvement over previous computational approaches – enabling discovery processes to be completed in weeks that previously required months.
Chai’s agreement with Pfizer further demonstrates the increasing speed of adoption of frontier AI models by major pharmaceutical companies as the industry moves from research breakthroughs into deployment across real discovery workflows.
About Chai Discovery
Chai Discovery is building a world where new medicines are not found through trial and error, but designed with the precision, speed and scale of modern engineering. Chai’s models are designed to reason about biological structure and function, generate new molecular designs from scratch, and help pharma teams pursue targets that traditional discovery methods have struggled to reach.
Founded in 2024 by Joshua Meier, Jack Dent, Matthew McPartlon and Jacques Boitreaud, Chai Discovery is based in San Francisco, California. With backgrounds spanning OpenAI, Meta FAIR, Stripe, molecular design and academic research, the team shares a singular vision: to bring the precision and predictability of engineering to one of the hardest problems in science – better, faster therapeutics, for even the toughest ‘undruggable’ conditions.
Chai Discovery is backed by top investors, including Oak HC/FT, General Catalyst, OpenAI, Thrive Capital, Menlo Ventures and Dimension.
Contacts
