WASHINGTON (dpa-AFX) - San Francisco-based biotech startup Tahoe Therapeutics announced has secured $30 million in fresh funding to accelerate development of its AI-powered virtual cell models, a technology aimed at transforming drug discovery.
The round led by Amplify Partners with participation from Databricks Ventures, General Catalyst, Mubadala Ventures, and others-brings Tahoe's total funding to $42 million and values the company at $120 million.
Founded in 2022 by CEO Nima Alidoust, CSO Johnny Yu, and UCSF scientists Hani Goodarzi and Kevin Shokat, Tahoe is pursuing one of biology's most ambitious goals: digitally recreating the complexity of a living cell.
While AI has made significant advances in protein modeling, building accurate cell-wide simulations has been hindered by the scarcity of large, high-quality biological datasets.
In February, Tahoe made a breakthrough with the release of Tahoe-100M, a dataset containing 100 million datapoints mapping how cancer cells respond to more than 1,000 molecules. This 'perturbation' data enables AI models to predict how cells will react to new compounds, reducing costly trial-and-error experiments and improving the odds of drug development success.
The company's proprietary Mosaic platform can simultaneously test thousands of patient-derived cell types, generating massive datasets at scale. Its data has already supported external research-nonprofit Arc Institute used Tahoe-100M to build an open-source virtual cell model with twice the predictive accuracy of previous systems.
With the new capital, Tahoe aims to expand its dataset to over one billion single-cell datapoints and advance a drug candidate for a major cancer subtype toward clinical trials.
The company is also exploring strategic collaborations with pharmaceutical and AI firms to broaden the reach of its technology.
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