Onepot AI raises $13M to help make chemical drug creation easier

For Daniil Boiko and Andrei Tyrin, the idea for Onepot AI came from the same frustration.

“The best ideas in drug discovery were often blocked not by biology, but by synthesis,” Boiko told TechCrunch. Synthesis is the creation of new molecules by using chemical reactions. It’s like a recipe or Lego pieces, where small pieces, ingredients, molecules, come together to form a wider puzzle picture, a food dish, a larger molecule.

As one might expect, it’s quite hard to create those small molecules that go on to build bigger ones.

For Boiko, a Ph.D. candidate studying machine learning in chemistry at Carnegie Mellon (he received his bachelor’s and master’s in organic chemistry from a university in Russia), that meant realizing that drug hunters — the scientists who oversee drug discovery and