Google, Tencent Join $15M Investment in AI-Powered Biotech Startup XtalPi
Google is continuing to expand its presence in China, despite restrictions on its presence there. Google, along with Tencent and Sequoia China, has co-led a $15 million investment in XtalPi, a U.S.-Chinese biotech company that uses artificial intelligence and computing to accelerate the development of new drugs. Founded in 2014 by three MIT graduates, XtalPi uses a combination of artificial intelligence, quantum physics algorithms and cloud computing to predict the structure of drug molecules. The company has 60 employees in offices in Cambridge, Beijing and Shenzhen. The new investment brings XtalPi’s total investments to $20 million and will be used to develop new computational models and expand its presence in new parts of the pharmaceutical industry. The partnership is the first between Google and Tencent since they agreed to a patent settlement last week.
