26. Iambic Therapeutics

Founders: Tom Miller (CEO), Fred Manby
Launched: 2020
Headquarters: San Diego, California
Funding: $220 million
Valuation: N/A
Key Technologies: Artificial intelligence, cloud computing, deep neural networks/deep learning, generative AI, machine learning, robotics, quantum computing
Industry: Biotech
Previous appearances on Disruptor 50 list: 0

It can take 10-15 years for today's biopharmaceutical companies to bring new drugs all the way through discovery and clinical trial. San Diego-based Iambic Therapeutics' AI-driven platform can accelerate the pace of drug discovery and development, enabling drug development in just a few years.

The company has novel medications in its pipeline to treat breast cancer and other HER2 cancers, and recently formed a research collaboration with pharmaceutical giant and brain health specialist Lundbeck for a small molecule therapeutic to treat migraines. By predicting how its new molecules will interact with human systems, Iambic's technology can also reduce the need for clinical trials. 

The company, originally called Entos, was founded when CEO Thomas Miller, a theoretical chemist and professor at California Institute of Technology, teamed up with longtime collaborator Fred Manby. In its first iteration, the company worked on making better chemical predictions across many industries and with companies including Toyota and Procter & Gamble. But the founders saw applications for their work in what's called small molecule drug discovery. Small molecule drugs, often synthesized chemically, target specific proteins or cellular pathways.

Iambic's platform for drug discovery is called Enchant. The company says it provides high-confidence predictions in data-poor situations, such as early-stage and clinical-stage drug programs.

"(Cancer) is an area of huge need," Miller told an interviewer for the California Institute of Technology in 2022. "It's an incredibly fast, quickly advancing disease. Many people are afflicted by it. There's many varieties of it. It is the combination of those things that means that if you have the ability to design a new drug, there's a way to … have a relatively fast timescale to advance that to the point where it's in human trials."

Rather than selling its drug-discovery services and software to pharmaceutical companies, Iambic has focused on producing its own drugs. "Instead of running around, trying to convince people that this software is so great, and they should buy it, you can actually just use it and execute with it, and actually make better molecules. Then those molecules can stand on their own two feet," Miller said.

In 2024, Iambic completed a B round of funding, with investors including OrbiMed, Nvidia and Sequoia Capital, and announced a collaboration with Nvidia, which has been teaming up as a venture investor with many startups across sectors using AI, including, for example, agtech Disruptor Carbon Robotics.

Iambic also moved into a new headquarters in San Diego last year and took its headcount to about 100, enabling the company to run experiments on thousands of newly discovered molecules each week. It also announced an update to NeuralPLexer, which predicts protein-ligand structures, and published data in Nature Machine Intelligence showing that NeuralPLexer outperformed AlphaFold, the Nobel Prize in Chemistry winner developed by Google's DeepMind. Iambic also hired its first CFO, Michael Secora, who previously worked at publicly held biotech company Recursion.