March 1, 2023
Qiming Venture Partners Led the Round, with Kan Chen Joining Company’s Board of Directors
SUZHOU, SHANGHAI, and NEW YORK – March 1, 2023 – TandemAI, a technology company focused on transforming drug discovery infrastructure, today announced it has raised $35 million in a Series A financing to expand its drug discovery service platform that integrates breakthrough computational tools with wet lab biophysics, medicinal chemistry, and biology. Qiming Venture Partners led the financing along with participation from OrbiMed, Eight Roads Ventures, and F Prime Capital.
“Innovations continue to emerge in the space of AI drug discovery, and TandemAI is working to address the significant barriers to both accessing the most advanced computational tools and integrating them with biological and chemistry expertise,” said Kan Chen, Partner at Qiming Venture Partners. “The rapid growth of TandemAI’s client base since its founding 15 months ago reflects that interest and the potential value the company’s approach brings to accelerating drug discovery.” In connection with the financing, Kan Chen will join the TandemAI board of directors.
“TandemAI has developed a compelling vision for drug discovery that leverages both best-in-class experimental and computational technologies,” said Jarlon Chang, Managing Partner and Head of China for Eight Roads. “Significantly, their integrated approach streamlines the discovery workflow and enables access to state-of-the-art computational tools to biotechnology companies at any stage and any scale. They have assembled a world class team that is executing on that vision.”
“The financing is a strong endorsement of our strategy, value proposition, and the progress we have made to date,” said Jeff He, MBA, co-founder and CEO of TandemAI. “The funds will allow us to increase our wet lab capacity to over 500 chemists and biologists and continue development of our world class computational tools to service the expanding biotech client base in the U.S. and China.” He noted the company’s client base currently includes about fifty companies.
TandemAI was established in late 2021 with a mission to lower the barrier to entry to the most advanced tools in drug discovery, including physics-based molecular simulation, artificial intelligence, and access to supercomputing infrastructure. The company’s fully integrated pre-clinical drug discovery platform is designed to empower researchers to discover better therapeutic candidates faster and more efficiently by democratizing access to the most innovative tools in drug discovery. The goal is to dramatically improve the success rate of pre-clinical therapeutic candidates and, ultimately, help improve the lives of people waiting for new treatment options.
The company completed $25 million Seed and pre-Series A financing in late 2021.
About Qiming Venture Partners
Founded in 2006, Qiming Venture Partners is a leading China venture capital firm with offices in Shanghai, Beijing, Suzhou, Hong Kong, Seattle, Boston and the San Francisco Bay Area.
Currently, Qiming Venture Partners manages eleven US Dollar funds and seven RMB funds with $9.4 billion in capital raised. Since our establishment, we have invested in outstanding companies in the Technology and Consumer (T&C) and Healthcare industries at the early and growth stages. Since our debut, we have backed over 480 fast-growing and innovative companies. Over 180 of our portfolio companies have achieved exits through IPOs at the NYSE, NASDAQ, HKEX, Shanghai Stock Exchange or Shenzhen Stock Exchange, or through M&A or by other means. There are also over 70 portfolio companies that have achieved unicorn status.
About OrbiMed
OrbiMed is a leading healthcare investment firm, with over $17 billion in assets under management. OrbiMed invests globally across the healthcare industry through a range of private equity funds, public equity funds, and royalty/credit funds. OrbiMed’s team of over 100 professionals is based in New York City, San Francisco, Shanghai, Hong Kong, Mumbai, Herzliya, and other key global markets.
About Eight Roads Ventures / F-Prime Capital
Eight Roads Ventures is a global proprietary investment firm backed by Fidelity, managing over $11 billion of assets across China, India, Europe, Israel, Japan and the U.S. Our 50-year history of investing includes partnerships with over 300 healthcare and technology companies globally. Some of Eight Roads Ventures’ global investments include Alibaba, Beam Therapeutics, Pony.ai, Innovent, Insilico Medicine, Hibob, Medbanks, Semma Therapeutics and WuXi PharmaTech.
F-Prime Capital, backed by Fidelity, is a global venture capital firm investing in healthcare and technology. For the past 50 years, our independent venture capital group has had the privilege of backing great entrepreneurs building iconic companies such as Denali, Beam, Innovent, Prime Medicine, Orchard, Iora, Devoted Health, and Ultragenyx.
About TandemAI
TandemAI is an advanced technology company dedicated to reinventing drug discovery infrastructure. The company integrates proprietary AI-driven and physics-based high performance computation with its efficient, large-scale in-house wet lab operations to deliver a turnkey drug discovery solution. TandemAI, with offices in New York, San Diego and China, has built its networked platform from the ground up in China to increase the speed of drug discovery and deliver cost-effective opportunities to its partners and to the global scientific community.
