Terray Therapeutics has raked in $120 million for a series B fundraise as the AI-focused biotech aims to transform small molecule drug development.
New investor Bedford Ridge Capital and existing investor NVentures—NVIDIA’s VC arm—led the funding round, which was double the size of Terray's series A, according to an Oct. 17 release.
The Los Angeles-based biotech will use the new cash to advance internal immunology programs into the clinic and continue building out tNova, the company’s generative AI platform. tNova is designed to improve the speed, cost and success rate of drug development. So far, the platform has helped Terray measure more than 5 billion target-ligand interactions over the last three years, a figure the biotech believes is about 50 times larger than all publicly available chemistry data.
“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,” Terray CEO and co-founder Jacob Berlin, Ph.D, said in the release. “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.”
Terry has also snagged partnerships with Big Pharma Bristol Myers Squibb and Alphabet subsidiary Calico, a biotech working on aging interventions. Both collaborations are multi-target pacts across a range of conditions.
The $120 million is exactly double Terray’s series A financing, a $60 million round that closed in early 2022.
Since then, the biotech has tapped former Merck & Co. director Feroze (Fez) Ujjainwalla to serve as chief business officer, plus Anna Goranson as chief people officer. Alnylam’s founding CEO John Maraganore has also joined on as strategic advisor to the board.