Cheiron Raises $8M Seed Round to Advance AI-Native Drug Development Platform

Cheiron, the commercial brand of Korean AI startup PhnyX Lab, has closed an $8 million (KRW 11.84 billion) seed round to scale its generative AI platform for drug development and push further into the global biopharma market.

Menlo Ventures, the Silicon Valley venture firm behind Anthropic and Uber, led the round. Robert Langer, an MIT professor who has co-founded more than 40 biotech companies including Moderna, and Freda Lewis-Hall, former chief medical officer at Pfizer, joined as strategic advisors. Josh Meier, co-founder and CEO of Chai Discovery; Laxman Narasimhan, former CEO of Starbucks and Reckitt; and John Giannandrea, Apple’s former senior vice president of machine learning and AI, also took part in the round, drawn by Cheiron’s technology and growth potential.

Launched in late 2024 as Korea’s first retrieval-augmented generation (RAG)-based generative AI solution for drug development, Cheiron is built as an AI-native operating system that represents an entire drug program as a single connected system rather than a standalone search tool. The company says active users run more than 40 research queries per week on average and spend roughly six hours a week on the platform.

At the core of the platform is Cheiron’s proprietary Life Sciences Knowledge Graph, which links vast stores of biomedical, clinical, regulatory, patent, and commercial data into a single structured intelligence layer to support drug developers’ reasoning. Use cases include cross-checking clinical trial designs against regulatory precedent, flagging contradictions between competitors’ public disclosures and patent filings, and stress-testing the evidence behind mechanism-of-action hypotheses. Major Korean pharmaceutical and biotech companies, including Boryung, Hanmi Pharmaceutical, Dong-A Socio Group, and GC Biopharma, have adopted Cheiron for clinical development, regulatory affairs, competitive intelligence, and program leadership workflows.

Based in Los Altos, California, at the heart of Silicon Valley, Cheiron was established in 2024 through SK Networks’ early-stage incubation program. An SK Networks executive traveled to the U.S. to personally recruit a group of promising Stanford researchers and graduate students to build the venture, and has since served as a management advisor supporting the platform’s launch and growth. The round marks the first time a startup incubated through SK Networks’ program has secured outside investment — a milestone the company frames as validation of Cheiron’s AI and business-development capabilities beyond its corporate-venture origins.

Cheiron plans to use the new funding to expand the Life Sciences Knowledge Graph and extend its capabilities across clinical, regulatory, and strategic workflows, as well as to grow its engineering, product, and life-sciences teams. Alongside the round, the company added Robert Langer, Freda Lewis-Hall, and BG Rhee, former CEO of GC Biopharma and GI Innovation, to its advisory board.

“New drug development gets a lot of attention, but what ultimately matters is how quickly that drug can reach patients,” said Robert Langer. “Technology like Cheiron’s will play an important role in shortening development and launch timelines for new drugs.”

Venky Ganesan, a partner at Menlo Ventures who is joining Cheiron’s board, said the founding team “didn’t build another search tool for life sciences — they redefined what a drug program actually is.” He added that the single, structured view Cheiron gives drug developers of a program’s evidence, assumptions, risks, decisions, and commitments “has the potential to become fundamental infrastructure for how new drugs are developed.”

Sangeun Shin, head of SK Networks’ Global Innovation division and a Cheiron board member, welcomed Menlo Ventures and the round’s other new partners, saying that as Cheiron’s earliest investor, he has had a close view of the company turning an ambitious idea into real results and takes pride in what it has achieved so far. He added that he looks forward to Cheiron’s next stage of growth alongside its new partners.

Minseok Bae, CEO of Cheiron, said the new investment from prominent U.S. investors reflects recognition of the platform’s potential to expand K-biotech globally. “We will continue to drive innovation in the drug development process together with our new partners,” he said.