Aureka Biotechnologies has wrapped up a $100M Series B for large biological foundation models. The round lifts the AI-native startup’s total funding to almost $200M since it launched in 2023.
Granite Asia funded the first tranche of the round on its own, and a prominent strategic investor led the subsequent tranche. HighLight Capital joined, along with follow-on investments from existing shareholders MPCi and NRL Capital. The company, which operates from Laguna Hills, California, and Shanghai, announced the close on August 10.
The fresh capital will go mainly into research and large-scale training of Aureka’s next generation of biological foundation models, which the company says will improve performance on de novo molecular design, biological structure modeling, and function prediction. Part of the money also funds an upgrade to Lab-in-the-Loop, its experiment-centered feedback engine that connects models with single-cell functional screening and high-throughput experimental validation.
Aureka frames the round as a shift from using AI to make drug discovery more efficient to using AI to model living systems. In that setup, models are expected to learn the rules of biology rather than simply solve isolated tasks, with AI agents and automated experiments feeding results back into the models.
Aureka is part of a crowded field of AI-native drug discovery startups chasing foundation-model approaches. Its closed-loop infrastructure, where model predictions are tested in wet labs at scale, is the differentiator the company leans on as investors pour money into AI-driven drug design.
