Artificial intelligence is moving quickly into drug discovery as pharmaceutical and biotech companies look for ways to cut years off R&D timelines and increase the chances of success amid rising cost. More than 200 startups are now competing to weave AI directly into research workflows, attracting growing interest from investors. Converge Bio is the latest company to ride that shift, securing new capital as competition in the AI-driven drug discovery space heats up.
The Boston- and Tel Aviv–based startup, which helps pharma and biotech companies develop drugs faster using generative AI trained on molecular data, has raised a $25 million oversubscribed Series A round, led by Bessemer Venture Partners. TLV Partners and Vintage Investment Partners also joined the round, along with additional backing from unidentified executives at Meta, OpenAI, and Wiz.
In practice, Converge trains generative models on DNA, RNA, and protein sequences then plugs them into pharma and biotech’s workflows to speed up drug development.
“The drug-development lifecycle has defined stages — from target identification and discovery to manufacturing, clinical trials, and beyond — and within each, there are experiments we can support,” Converge Bio CEO and co-founder Dov Gertz said in an exclusive interview with TechCrunch. “Our platform continues to expand across these stages, helping bring new drugs to market faster.”
So far, Converge has rolled out customer-facing systems. The startup has already introduced three discrete AI systems: one for antibody design, one for protein yield optimization, and one for biomarker and target discovery.
“Take our antibody design system as an example. It’s not just a single model. It’s made up of three integrated components. First, a generative model creates novel antibodies. Next, predictive models filter those antibodies based on their molecular properties. Finally, a docking system, which uses physics-based model, simulates the three-dimensional interactions between the antibody and its target,” Gertz continued. The value lies in the system as a whole, not any single model, according to the CEO. “Our customers don’t have to piece models together themselves. They get ready-to-use systems that plug directly into their workflows.”
The new funding comes about a year and a half after the company raised a $5.5 million seed round in 2024.
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Since then, the two-year-old startup has scaled quickly. Converge has signed 40 partnerships with pharmaceutical and biotech companies and is currently running about 40 programs on its platform, Gertz said. It works with customers across the U.S., Canada, Europe and Israel and is now expanding into Asia.
The team has also grown rapidly, increasing to 34 employees from just nine in November 2024. Along the way, Converge has begun publishing public case studies. In one, the startup helped a partner boost protein yield by 4 to 4.5X in a single computational iteration. In another, the platform generated antibodies with extremely high binding affinity, reaching the single-nanomolar range, Gertz noted.
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