BOSTON, Mass. — Proxima, an AI-native biotechnology company focused on proximity-based medicines, said it has raised $80 million in an oversubscribed seed financing round to advance a new generation of AI-driven drug discovery.
The financing was led by DCVC, with participation from NVentures, NVIDIA’s venture capital arm, as well as Braidwell, Roivant, AIX Ventures, Yosemite, Magnetic Ventures, Alexandria Venture Investments, Modi Ventures, and other strategic and institutional investors.
As part of the funding, the company has rebranded from VantAI to Proxima to reflect its focus on developing the technology and data infrastructure needed to enable proximity-based therapeutics. These medicines are designed to control how proteins interact with one another, rather than simply inhibiting or activating a single target, and include emerging modalities such as molecular glues and PROTACs aimed at addressing historically difficult-to-drug disease targets.
The new capital will be used to accelerate the development of first-in-class proximity-modulating therapeutics across disease areas including oncology and immunology. Proxima said the approach has the potential to expand the druggable target space and improve the reliability of discovering novel therapeutic mechanisms.
“Proximity-based medicines represent one of the most powerful new ways to treat disease, but progress has been constrained by a lack of structural data and accurate design tools,” said Zachary Carpenter, co-founder and CEO of Proxima. “By combining proteome-scale structural data with frontier AI models, we’re building the foundation needed to make these therapies broadly accessible rather than rare exceptions.”
Protein-protein interactions underlie nearly all biological processes, yet fewer than 5 percent have been structurally characterized, leaving much of the human interactome unexplored. Proxima said its platform is designed to systematically map this space, enabling more rational design of proximity-based medicines, including current approaches and future therapeutic modalities.
At the core of the company’s technology is its NeoLink data-generation platform, which produces structural information on protein complexes at proteome-wide scale, paired with its Neo AI model series. Together, the systems support end-to-end discovery and development of proximity-modulating small molecules, with the goal of improving safety, reducing development timelines, and enabling new therapeutic mechanisms.
“Proximity-based therapeutics represent one of most promising frontiers in modern drug discovery with the potential to treat previously intractable diseases and target ‘undruggable’ proteins,” said Jason Pontin, General Partner at DCVC, who will join Proxima’s board of directors. “Proxima’s technology combines proteome-scale structural data with state-of-the-art generative AI foundation models, and the company’s team is uniquely well-positioned to discover and develop a new class of medicines.”
Proxima said it has established research collaborations with multiple biopharmaceutical companies, including Johnson & Johnson, Bristol Myers Squibb, and Blueprint Medicines, which was acquired by Sanofi. Several partnered programs are advancing toward clinical development, with the first expected to enter clinical trials in 2026.
