Onepot AI lands $13 million to speed up drug discovery with automation
Onepot AI, a startup shaking up how new medicines are made, just raised $13 million from investors like Fifty Years, Khosla Ventures, OpenAI's Wojciech Zaremba, and Google's Jeff Dean.
The funding will help them grow their team and ramp up their automated platform for making small molecules—a key step in developing new drugs.
What does Onepot AI actually do?
Drug discovery often gets stuck because making new compounds is slow and expensive.
Co-founder Daniil Boiko shared that many promising ideas get dropped since they're too hard to make by hand.
With Onepot's automated lab (POT-1) and its AI chemist "Phil," clients can order compounds from a catalog and get samples in days—something that usually takes human chemists months.
How does the tech work?
Their system learns from real-world experiments to plan out better ways to create molecules.
This not only makes the process faster but also opens doors to chemical designs people thought were impossible before.
Onepot hopes this will double the pace of drug discovery, putting them head-to-head with big names like WuXi AppTec and Enamine.
What's next for Onepot?
With fresh funding, they're opening a second lab in San Francisco, hiring more people, and upgrading their discovery engine—all aimed at making drug research quicker and smarter through automation plus AI insights.