ChemLex, an artificial intelligence startup focused on chemistry and drug discovery, announced raising $45 million in a funding round anchored by venture firm Granite Asia.
The funding announcement also coincides with the company’s launch of a new facility and global headquarters in Singapore, according to the announcement.
Founded in 2022, ChemLex builds software and automation systems designed to speed up chemical discovery for pharmaceutical and materials science work. It said it has more than 70 customers globally, including six of the world’s top 10 drugmakers.
Proceeds from the round will be used to expand hiring in Singapore, including hardware and software engineers, and additional chemists, as the company targets a wider range of projects.
The new facility in Singapore will deploy an autonomous chemistry platform that can run experiments around the clock with limited human oversight, using robotic equipment to handle tasks such as mixing reagents, monitoring reactions, and transferring samples.
ChemLex said the system records data in real time and can substantially increase experimental throughput compared with traditional manual workflows.
The company is replicating in Singapore a fully automated lab that it operates in Shanghai.
Chemlex founder and CEO Sean Lin said the company is building an R&D engine that compresses months of synthesis and optimisation into weeks or even days, transforming both the speed and certainty of discovery.
“Singapore strengthens this effort and provides us an ecosystem to scale rapidly and support partners globally who need this capability now,” Lin said.
ChemLex is also collaborating with Singapore’s Experimental Drug Development Centre (EDDC) under a memorandum of understanding aimed at accelerating small-molecule drug discovery through advanced automation.
The company last raised $26 million in January 2024 in a Series A financing round led by Qiming Venture Partners and LYFE Capital, with Sinovation Ventures and MegaRobo participating.
ChemLex’s latest funding round comes as the company cited forecasts projecting the AI-powered drug discovery market could expand from about $3.6 billion in 2024 to roughly $50 billion by 2034.
The funding round also takes place as startups in Singapore continued to dominate capital formation in the region, attracting about $261.8 million across 26 deals in October. Of the top five transactions in October by value, four were signed in Singapore, with Endowus and Berkeley Energy leading the pack.
