LOS ALTOS, Calif., July 22, 2026 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) — Cheiron, the operating system for drug programs, today announced an $8 million seed round led by Menlo Ventures, with the backing and strategic support of industry veterans including Moderna co-founder and MIT Institute Professor Robert Langer; former Pfizer Chief Medical Officer Freda Lewis-Hall; Chai Discovery co-founder and CEO Josh Meier; former Starbucks CEO Laxman Narasimhan; and former Apple AI chief John Giannandrea.
Cheiron is building the first AI-native operating system designed to represent an entire drug program as a single connected system.
In less than six months since launch, Cheiron has been adopted by tens of thousands of biopharma professionals and deployed by major drug developers.
The Problem: Drug Development Still Runs on Fragmented Context
Drug development is one of the most complex decision-making processes in any industry.
Every program is built on thousands of interconnected pieces of evidence: experiments, clinical results, regulatory interactions, competitive developments, scientific literature, operational decisions, and strategic assumptions.
Yet despite billions of dollars invested in drug development, the drug program itself has never existed as software.
Instead, the knowledge that determines whether a therapy succeeds is scattered across papers, trials, filings, patents, datasets, presentations, and institutional memory. Teams spend enormous amounts of time reconstructing context before making critical decisions, relying on fragmented systems and human interpretation to connect the dots.
The information is not missing. The system for representing it has been.
Cheiron uses AI to model the live state of a drug program as a single connected system—giving teams a shared representation of the evidence, assumptions, decisions, risks, and commitments that shape development. Advances in AI and knowledge representation have only recently made this possible.
“Every important decision in drug development depends on understanding what is known, what is assumed, what remains uncertain, and what has already been decided,” said Minseok Bae, CEO and co-founder of Cheiron. “We built Cheiron to make that state visible for the first time, so teams can spend less time assembling information and more time advancing therapies.”
The Product: A Structured Model of the Drug Program
At the center of Cheiron’s platform is its proprietary Life Sciences Knowledge Graph (LKG) — a structured intelligence layer connecting the world’s biomedical, clinical, regulatory, patent, and commercial knowledge into a single model.
The LKG is purpose-built for the inferences drug developers make every day: cross-referencing a trial design against regulatory precedent, surfacing contradictions between a competitor’s published data and their patent filings, or stress-testing a mechanism-of-action hypothesis against the full body of available evidence.
Customers use Cheiron across clinical development, regulatory affairs, competitive intelligence, and program leadership workflows to evaluate programs, align stakeholders, and make decisions with greater confidence.
“Cheiron helps us move beyond searching across fragmented sources toward understanding the full state of a program,” said Jung Gyun Kim, CEO at Boryung, one of the top five pharmaceutical companies in Korea that has already deployed Cheiron. “By connecting evidence, assumptions, risks, and decisions in one place, the platform gives teams a clearer way to evaluate programs and support critical decisions.”
“Minseok and the team didn’t build another search tool for life sciences — they rethought what a drug program actually is,” said Venky Ganesan, Partner at Menlo Ventures, who is joining Cheiron’s board. “Cheiron gives drug developers a single, structured view of the evidence, assumptions, risks, decisions, and commitments behind an entire program. That has the potential to become foundational infrastructure for how therapies are developed. We’re thrilled to partner with Cheiron as they bring this platform to the global biopharma market.”
What’s Next: Building the System of Record for Drug Development
This funding round will accelerate the development of Cheiron’s Life Sciences Knowledge Graph, expand the platform’s capabilities across clinical, regulatory, and strategic workflows, and grow the company’s engineering, product, and life sciences teams.
Cheiron is also welcoming a group of scientific and operating advisors who have built and led drug programs at the highest levels of the industry, including Robert Langer, Moderna co-founder, MIT Institute Professor and co-founder of more than 40 biotech companies; Freda Lewis-Hall, former chief medical officer at Pfizer; and BG Rhee, former CEO of Green Cross Corp. and GI Innovation.
“Discovery gets much of the attention, but execution ultimately determines how quickly new medicines reach patients,” said Robert Langer, Co-Founder, Moderna. “Technologies like Cheiron, which help compress development timelines across the drug lifecycle, can play an important role in accelerating that process.”
About Cheiron
Cheiron is building the operating system for drug programs. The company’s AI-native platform helps biopharma teams represent, reason over, and stress-test the full state of a drug development program — including the claims, evidence, assumptions, risks, decisions, and commitments that determine whether a therapy advances. Powered by its proprietary Life Sciences Knowledge Graph, Cheiron supports teams across clinical, regulatory, competitive intelligence, and program leadership workflows. Founded in 2024 by Stanford-trained AI researchers and biopharma operators, Cheiron is headquartered in Los Altos, California.
Learn more at cheiron.bio.
Media Contact:
Donggi Lee
donggi.lee@cheiron.bio
A photo accompanying this announcement is available at https://www.globenewswire.com/NewsRoom/AttachmentNg/6d37cbf6-1dd0-4594-b298-fe95bfc4827b
