Pathos AI Inc. said it has closed a $237 million funding round at a $3 billion valuation, with Bristol Myers Squibb Co. leading the Series E as the pharmaceutical giant deepens its ties to the startup's cancer drug platform.
Several returning investors whose names were not disclosed also took part, according to Pathos. The company's existing investor roster includes AstraZeneca plc, NEA and General Atlantic.
Pathos develops cancer drugs with the help of Foundry, an artificial intelligence platform the company says has access to roughly 200 petabytes of oncological data. Foundry also takes in information generated by Pathos' own drug development programs, and the company says the system analyzes those datasets to help its researchers work more efficiently.
Drug research efforts can yield hundreds of candidate molecules with potential to become medicines, and Pathos says Foundry uses AI agents to identify the most promising ones and then determine which patients are most likely to benefit from each therapy. The company also uses Foundry to plan clinical trials, which it describes as biomarker-driven, meaning they rely on biological signals that can indicate whether a drug is working.
Iker Huerga, Pathos' chief executive, said the company is building a platform meant to systematically raise the odds of success in drug development, and that Foundry has sharply accelerated its ability to find promising clinical assets and bring them into its pipeline.
The new capital will fund that development work. Pathos said its key priority is JSKN016, a program aimed at an antibody-drug conjugate cancer therapy. Such treatments pair antibodies that bind to disease-causing cells with an antigen that, once absorbed by cancer cells, neutralizes them. The company plans to put the money behind three other programs as well, including a collaboration with AstraZeneca to develop an ER PROTAC drug that uses cells' built-in material recycling mechanism to treat cancer.
Bristol Myers Squibb's investment is part of a broader partnership that also involves Tempus AI Inc., a publicly traded medical data provider. Under the arrangement, Pathos will pay Tempus $55 million over five years to license anonymized data from patients with neurological conditions, which Pathos will analyze with Foundry to better understand disease biology. Pathos will make both Foundry and the dataset available to Bristol Myers Squibb, which will use them to improve its clinical trials and identify patients most likely to benefit from new drugs.
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