Insider Brief
- Terray Therapeutics has raised $120 million in Series B funding, led by Bedford Ridge Capital and NVentures (NVIDIA’s venture arm), to advance its small molecule drug development programs into clinical trials and enhance its AI platform, tNova.
- The company has built the world’s largest chemistry dataset, using this data to power generative AI for drug discovery, with notable partnerships including Bristol Myers Squibb and Calico.
- The funding will also support internal immunology programs and leadership team expansion, positioning Terray as a leader in AI-driven small molecule drug design.
PRESS RELEASE — Terray Therapeutics, a biotechnology company improving human health by transforming the speed, cost, and success rate of small molecule drug development using computation integrated with novel data at scale, today announced Series B funding of $120 million. The funding will progress internal programs into clinical trials and further enhance Terray’s integrated AI platform, tNova, which it uses to power both internal and partnered programs.
The round was led by new investor Bedford Ridge Capital and existing investor NVentures (NVIDIA’s venture capital arm), with participation from new and existing investors including Maverick Capital, Goldcrest Capital, Madrona Ventures, Two Sigma Ventures, XTX Ventures, Digitalis Ventures, and Alexandria Ventures. Sid Shenai, who partnered with Bedford Ridge Capital on this financing, will join Terray’s Board of Directors.
“We’re delighted that this funding will help us bring new medicines forward for patients in need. That’s why we all work at Terray,” said Jacob Berlin, Ph.D, co-founder and CEO of Terray Therapeutics. “Knowledge of what causes human disease has exploded in the ‘omics’ era, but the ability to discover and develop new molecules to treat those diseases hasn’t kept pace. Trained on rapidly iterating, precise data generated at unprecedented scale in our labs, Terray’s AI will dramatically improve the success rate of small molecule development and bring relief to patients.”
With its proprietary experimental platform, Terray has built the world’s largest chemistry dataset, having quantitatively measured 5 billion+ target-ligand interactions in the past 3 years–roughly 50X the entirety of all publicly available chemistry data. This dataset is doubling annually. Terray’s unique data advantage enables best-in-class AI capabilities to identify and optimize novel small molecule solutions to the most complex problems. Terray applies this expertise to its own internal pipeline focused on immunological diseases and to additional challenging targets in partnership with Bristol Myers Squibb and Calico.
“Terray’s unique, high-quality data generation enables continuous advanced generative AI development, like their COATI models,” said Kimberly Powell, vice president of healthcare at NVIDIA. “Rapid experiments combined with advanced AI creates a molecule discovery and design flywheel able to take on the most difficult and yet to be discovered targets.”
Since its Series A financing round in 2021, Terray has solidified its position as a leader in generative AI-driven small-molecule drug design.
Notable milestones include:
- Rapidly progressed multiple internal immunology programs towards the clinic, all capitalizing on AI-driven optimization of chemistry starting points discovered de novo.
- Entered into multi-target partnership agreements with Calico and Bristol Myers Squibb to tackle challenging targets across a range of diseases.
- Published its industry-leading chemistry foundation model, COATI, and recently brought latent diffusion machine learning to small molecule design for the first time. These AI tools are co-pilots that Terray’s medicinal chemists use every day to explore the vast chemical space with maximum efficiency.
- Strengthened its position with key additions to its leadership team, including Feroze (Fez) Ujjainwalla as Chief Business Officer and Anna Goranson as Chief People Officer, as well as advisory and board appointments including John Maraganore, founding CEO of Alnylam Pharmaceuticals and veteran biotech industry leader, as Strategic Advisor and the addition of both Bassil Dahiyat, founding CEO of Xencor, and Sudha Parasuraman, a biotech leader, as members of the Board of Directors.
About Terray Therapeutics
Terray is a biotechnology company with the technology, data, and mindset to radically change the way we discover and develop small molecule therapeutics. The company explores molecules and targets with a sophisticated integration of ultra-high throughput experimentation, generative AI, biology, medicinal chemistry, automation, and nanotechnology. Terray’s platform uniquely blends experimentation and computation to deliver on the promise of generative AI for small molecule discovery — finding solutions to the toughest therapeutic challenges. To learn more about Terray visit: terraytx.com.
Contacts
Erika Shaffer for Terray Therapeutics, erika@madrona.com 206–972–5514
