Key highlights
- Investor Confidence: Backed by Eli Lilly, the round enhances Persist AI’s pharma credibility and strengthens its market scalability.
- AI-Powered Robotics: The platform enables over 1,000 formulation experiments/month—30x faster than traditional methods—driven by predictive AI models.
- Strategic Focus on LAIs: By starting with complex long-acting injectables, Persist AI addresses one of pharma’s most technically challenging formulation types.
Persist AI, a healthcare deep tech startup based in Sacramento, CA, has successfully raised $12 million in Series A funding. The round was led by Spero Ventures with participation from Eli Lilly & Co., Global Brain, and Y Combinator. Persist AI is leveraging AI-powered robotics to address the long-standing inefficiencies in drug formulation development.
This capital injection goes beyond funding—it validates Persist AI’s mission to accelerate the journey of a drug from molecular discovery to clinical readiness through data-driven automation.
Solving a Hidden Bottleneck in Drug Development
Formulation development typically takes 8–12 years and accounts for around 20% of total drug development costs. Despite rapid progress in drug discovery, formulation remains a manual, trial-and-error process. Persist AI seeks to change that with a scalable robotic system that increases both speed and reproducibility.
An AI-First Formulation Platform
Persist AI’s proprietary platform is built on three pillars:
- Custom-built automation for pharmaceutical chemistry, optimized to handle complex materials beyond water-based samples.
- Miniaturized formulation via microfluidics that enables rapid, resource-efficient development with seamless scale-up capabilities.
- Structured data pipelines that generate high-quality datasets for training machine learning models, which predict critical formulation properties like drug loading, particle size, and release rates.
Validated Performance
A pharmaceutical client struggling for six months to develop a formulation succeeded in just 28 days using Persist AI’s platform. This dramatic acceleration underscores the power of combining robotics with data-rich experimentation.
Regulatory Alignment and Future Scale
Persist AI’s method aligns with the FDA’s encouragement of continuous manufacturing and reduction of animal testing. Their ability to precisely control particle formation and process variables fits into quality-by-design regulatory frameworks.
What’s Next for Persist AI
With Series A funding secured, Persist AI will:
- Launch a cGMP-compatible manufacturing line to fulfill pharma contracts.
- Expand its cloud-accessible AI lab to make high-speed formulation development available to more biotech firms.
- Grow its engineering, automation, and AI teams to support future scale and innovation.
Persist AI is not just improving how formulations are made—it’s redefining what’s possible in the future of pharmaceutical development.
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