AI drug development startup Pathos AI closes $237M investment

Pathos AI has closed a $237 million Series E round at a $3 billion valuation, with Bristol Myers Squibb leading the deal. The company said several unnamed existing investors also joined in, while its backers already include AstraZeneca, NEA and General Atlantic.

The startup is focused on cancer drug discovery, and its pitch rests on Foundry, the AI platform it uses to sort through research work. Pathos says Foundry can tap about 200 petabytes of oncological data, including information generated by the company’s own drug programs. The system then analyzes those datasets to help researchers narrow down which molecules look most promising and which patients might benefit most from a given therapy.

That matters because drug development throws off a lot of dead ends. Pathos says Foundry helps it work through hundreds of candidate molecules, then supports trial planning once a lead starts to look real. The company describes its studies as biomarker-driven, meaning it uses biological signals such as proteins or patient metrics to judge whether a drug is working.

CEO Iker Huerga frames the software as a way to raise the odds of success, not just speed things up. He says Foundry has already accelerated Pathos’ ability to spot promising clinical assets and fold them into the pipeline. The fresh capital will go into drug development, with JSKN016 set as the company’s key priority.

JSKN016 is a cancer therapy based on an antibody-drug conjugate, a format that combines an antibody with a therapeutic payload to target cancer cells. Pathos will also fund three other programs, including one with AstraZeneca on an ER PROTAC drug. And the Bristol Myers Squibb partnership goes beyond cash: Pathos will pay Tempus $55 million over five years for anonymized neurological patient data, then make both that dataset and Foundry available to Bristol Myers Squibb for trial work and patient selection.