Onepot AI raises $13M to help make chemical drug creation easier

Onepot AI is a startup founded by Daniil Boiko and Andrei Tyrin to address a critical bottleneck in drug discovery: the difficulty of synthesizing small molecules that serve as building blocks for new drugs. While advances in molecular design and AI have accelerated idea generation, the actual chemical synthesis process remains slow, costly, and error-prone, often causing promising drug candidates to be abandoned before testing. Boiko, with a background in organic chemistry and machine learning, and Tyrin, experienced in computational drug discovery, recognized that the synthesis challenge was underappreciated and exacerbated by geopolitical concerns such as supply chain vulnerabilities and U.S.-China trade tensions. Their solution was to create Onepot, which combines an automated synthesis lab called POT-1 with an AI-driven organic chemist named Phil to streamline and accelerate molecule creation. Onepot recently emerged from stealth mode with $13 million in funding, including a seed round led by Fifty Years. The company offers biotech and pharmaceutical clients a catalog of