Chai Discovery Signs Six Big Pharma Companies in Nine Months as AI Models Become the Deal

Chai Discovery, a San Francisco AI protein and antibody design company founded in March 2024 with no drug pipeline of its own, has signed seven deals with six top pharma companies in nine months, including Pfizer, Novartis, argenx, Bristol Myers Squibb, Eli Lilly and, in early October 2026, GSK. Rather than buying pipelines, the companies are licensing access to Chai's models, with Lilly and Pfizer also obtaining models trained on their proprietary data. Chai raised $400 million in July 2026 at a valuation approaching $3.8 billion, and its third-generation model Chai-3 claims a success rate double that of Chai-2, which hit about 16 percent across 52 de novo protein design targets.