ReactWise Raises $3.4M to Transform Big Pharma with AI and Self-driving Labs

Reactwise has secured $3.4 million in pre-seed funding, including a competitive Innovate UK grant, to enable AI-driven robotic laboratories and speed up pharmaceutical manufacturing R&D. The pre-seed round was backed by Y Combinator, the UK government, and leading venture capitalists and angel investors committed to advancing AI-driven, sustainable pharmaceutical manufacturing.

The discovery of novel pharmaceuticals is one of our most important weapons in fighting disease. “However, the drug development pipeline is often driven by trial-and-error and held up for many months during the identification of scalable manufacturing processes, delaying clinical trials.”, says Alexander Pomberger, CEO and Co-Founder of ReactWise. “Our AI-powered models learn from historical data, cutting up to 95% of experimental work and accelerating these workflows by 30x.”

Since completing Y Combinator’s summer 2024 batch, Reactwise has launched their improved software and is currently running 12 pilot studies with some of the largest pharmaceutical companies. Moreover, in their robotic laboratory they have already screened thousands of chemical reactions to build up their proprietary reactivity models. By integrating with automated lab infrastructure and electronic lab notebooks, Reactwise is positioning itself as the next-generation intelligence layer for pharmaceutical R&D.

"ReactWise’s AI enables chemists to simply input a drug molecule and receive a fully optimized, scalable manufacturing process - executed autonomously in a self-driving laboratory that fine-tunes conditions in real time" says Daniel Wigh, CTO and Co-Founder of ReactWise. “This technology not only accelerates drug manufacturing but also improves sustainability by reducing chemical waste, energy consumption, and raw material costs.” With growing demand for more efficient, cost-effective, and environmentally friendly manufacturing solutions, Reactwise is set to become a critical enabler for the pharmaceutical industry.

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