Aureka Raises $100M Series B, Open-Sources OpenDDE Drug Discovery Engine
机器之心 · wechat · 2026-08-11
AI drug discovery firm Aureka (寻明生科) recently closed a $100 million Series B round. Its core asset is the AuraIDE drug discovery engine, combining generative AI with a wet-lab-in-the-loop.
- Focus on Antibodies: Unlike small molecules, antibodies can be directly encoded into DNA and tested at high throughput, making them ideal for Generative AI Scaling Laws.
- Lab-in-the-Loop: The company built a single-cell microfluidic high-throughput wet lab, shrinking reaction volumes a million times to run millions of tests in parallel. Real-world experimental results flow back to the foundation model, providing scarce functional data.
- AuraIDE & OpenDDE: The model uses all-atom 3D tokenization, unifying structure prediction with de novo design. Its open-source version, OpenDDE, achieved a 76.1% DockQ success rate in third-party antibody-antigen complex benchmarks, outperforming AlphaFold3's 47.9%.
- Business Model: A "selling both the engine and the car" strategy. It open-sources models for pharma validation while using the closed-loop system to generate drug assets for pipeline licensing. Its first antibody is slated for Phase I trials in 2026.
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