HITS, a South Korean AI drug development company spun out of KAIST, has closed a Series B of 18.3 billion won, about $13.4M. Premier Partners, Korea Investment Partners and Yuanta Investment all bought into the Series B. That takes cumulative backing to roughly 28.6 billion won, or about $21M.
The money funds a November launch of the company’s AI Co-Scientist, a service that walks researchers through the drug discovery workflow. For clinical programs the promise is throughput, and throughput is what decides how quickly a candidate reaches trials and the patients enrolled in them.
Under the hood sits an ensemble: several purpose-built models plus agents that go through the literature, crunch the data and test hypotheses. On HITS’s own internal benchmarks the stack lands as high as 94 percent. HITS says the beta build already has about 300 researchers working inside it.
The company’s roadmap for 2027 folds the co-scientist into robotic lab gear, so that designing a candidate molecule and analyzing it stop being separate jobs and become one continuous pipeline.
HITS builds on HyperLab and has worked with institutions including MD Anderson Cancer Center and South Korea’s National Cancer Center.
Why it matters: the crowded pitch in AI drug discovery is usually a new molecule. HITS is selling the researcher instead, an agent layer bolted on top of work already under way. If it holds up, the payoff is throughput, meaning more hypotheses tested per scientist each year.
