ByteDance spin-off Anew Labs raises US$290m as AI drug developers enjoy fundraising boom

China is seeing a fresh fundraising boom for AI drug developers, with start-ups including a ByteDance spin-off raising hundreds of millions of dollars this week as investors rush to back domestic challengers to Anthropic and Isomorphic Labs.

Anew Labs, a Shanghai-based AI drug discovery firm that was formerly a unit of Chinese tech giant ByteDance, has raised US$290 million at a valuation of US$1.5 billion, according to an informed source.

Investors included prominent venture capital firms such as HSG – formerly Sequoia China – IDG Capital and 5Y Capital, the source said, with ByteDance maintaining a 56 per cent stake.

Anew Labs, which did not immediately respond to a request for comment, operates a range of artificial intelligence models for biomolecular structure prediction and design. They include AnewFold, its in-house foundation model, and Protenix, an open-source reproduction of AlphaFold 3, the most advanced biomolecular prediction AI model from Google DeepMind and its Isomorphic Labs spin-off.