Aureka Raises US$100 Million for Biological Foundation Models

Aureka has raised US$100 million in Series B financing to expand biological foundation models for drug discovery, the company announced in a press release. Granite Asia funded the first tranche exclusively, while a strategic investor led a later tranche with participation from HighLight Capital and existing shareholders including MPCi and NRL Capital.

Aureka has now raised nearly US$200 million. The company plans to use the new funding for research and large scale training of models for de novo molecular design, biological structure modeling, and function prediction.

The company also plans to upgrade its experiment centered feedback engine, which connects AI models with single cell functional screening, high throughput experimental validation, and drug development platforms. Aureka describes this system as a loop in which models generate molecular designs and hypotheses, experiments test them, and the resulting data is used to train the next model version.

Aureka's AuraIDE model is trained on proprietary protein coevolution data and is designed for protein structure modeling, molecular generation, biomolecular interaction modeling, function prediction, and optimization under design constraints. OpenDDE is the open source version of AuraIDE.