Anthropic Acquires Startup Coefficient Bio for About $400 Million
The Takeaway
- Anthropic acquires AI biotech startup Coefficient Bio for about $400 million.
- Coefficient Bio team joins Anthropic’s healthcare life sciences group.
- Coefficient Bio developed AI platform for drug discovery and R&D.
Anthropic has acquired AI biotech startup Coefficient Bio for roughly $400 million, according to a person with knowledge of the deal.
The startup’s team will be joining Anthropic’s healthcare life sciences group, which develops tools for the biotech industry ranging from drug discovery to clinical commercialization, said the person.
Coefficient Bio, which was founded last fall, was developing a platform that enables AI to run biotech tasks such as planning drug research and development, managing clinical regulatory strategy and identifying new drug opportunities. The company’s cofounders include CEO Aris Theologis, who previously held executive roles at life sciences firms Evozyne and Paragon Biosciences, and Chief Technology Officer Nathan Frey, who was a research scientist at Prescient Design and Genentech, according to their LinkedIn profiles. Coefficient Bio has fewer than ten employees, according to the person.
The deal, whose precise value couldn’t be learned, comes as Anthropic has doubled down on building AI tools targeting specific industries including finance, cybersecurity and life sciences. That’s in addition to allowing developers to access its Claude models through an application programming interface and its popular coding agent Claude Code.
In October, Anthropic made improvements to its Claude chatbot, like allowing it to connect to tools such as Benchling and BioRender commonly used by scientists and adding features to automate research tasks, to make it more useful for scientists. In January, Anthropic added new features to automate tasks for scientists like preparing regulatory submissions or drafting clinical trial protocols.
Anthropic has partnerships with life sciences companies Sanofi, Novo Nordisk, Genmab, AbbVie, the Allen Institute and HHMI. In January, Anthropic also expanded into healthcare, enabling doctors, insurers and healthcare companies to use Claude for medical tasks in a HIPPA-compliant environment.
Since staffing up its corporate development team last year, Anthropic has held discussions with companies to boost its efforts in industries such as healthcare and financial services. Anthropic also had discussions last fall with early-stage biotech startups about data licensing and partnerships.
Eric Kauderer-Abrams, previously an executive at health and life sciences companies Detect, identifeye, and Liminal Sciences, leads Anthropic’s health care life sciences group.