Reid Hoffman launches Manas AI, a new drug discovery startup

LinkedIn's co -founder and capitalist Airbnb and Zynga while supporting the nuclear fusion startup Helion Energy.

Now Hoffman is immersing himself in medical care, which he describes as “wonderful and terrifying”, with his last startup, Manas AI.

Hoffman and Dr. Siddhartha Mukherjee, an oncologist and author of the Pulitzer Award, presented the company on Monday. Manas will use artificial intelligence to try to accelerate the process of discovery of drugs, starting with new treatments for aggressive cancers such as prostate cancer, lymphoma and triple negative breast cancer.

Developing new drugs is traditionally an expensive and complex process. You can take more than 10 years and cost billions of dollars to develop a single medicine, according to a Deloitte report. Manas said he will use his patented chemical libraries and Filters with AI to identify drug candidates more quickly, which ideally reduces the process of discovery of decades just a few years.

“Most people have had friends, family, etc., who have died of cancer or had serious cancer problems,” Hoffman told CNBC in an interview this week. “If we can make a big difference in this, and this is the kind of things in which AI can make a big difference, it is the type of reason why AI can be great for humanity.”

Manas raised $ 24.6 million in initial funds, directed by General Catalyst and Hoffman with the participation of Graylock, where he is a partner. Hoffman has been deep in AI in recent years. It was one of the first investors in OpenAI, when the project was still a non -profit organization, and helped start the inflection AI along with the Deepmind co -founder, Mustafa Suleyman. Last year, Suleyman joined Microsoft, where Hoffman is a member of the Board, as the CEO of a new unit called Microsoft AI. Several inflection employees joined him.

Manas has also signed an association with Microsoftand will take advantage of its platform to compute with Azure clouds. Hoffman, who sold LinkedIn to Microsoft for $ 27 billion, said that Manas is also implementing several additional Microsoft tools, including some that are generally not yet available to the public.

Hoffman has been working with Mukherjee to create Manas for about a year, although the process collected steam in the last two months. Hoffman said the team felt ready to publicly share their ambitions this week from its baseline, the fundamental resources are in order.

The company has a long way ahead, and the drug discovery market is very competitive. Other new companies together with the main pharmaceutical companies such as Eli Lilly, Pfizer and MerckThey are also exploring how AI to accelerate the research and development of medicines.

Hoffman said he feels safe about Manas's approach, although he would be “totally delighted” to see several companies flourish.

“We also bring what a startup generally brings, which is a will to go very hard, abandon things quickly that they don't work,” he said. “Living like this week is important, and this week's result is important.”

After the launch of Manas on Monday, five different potential strategic partners have already approached the company, said Hoffman.

Hoffman said the company is in “quickly build” and “learn and implement.” One of its first initiatives is called Project Cosmos, which is an effort to draw the fundamental rules of the Union to Medicines, according to the company's website. Hoffman refused to share any additional detail about the project.

Currently, Manas has only four employees, including Hoffman and Mukherjee, but Hoffman said he will grow. He has been acting as the “AI Guy” of the company, while Mukherjee serves as the “Bio Guy,” he said. Ultimately, Manas is about merging the two fields.

“It's not just the best of science and it's not just the best of AI, because either of those two are insufficient,” said Hoffman. “You need to put together those two.”

As the type of AI, Hoffman was paying close attention this week to the sudden appearance of Deepseek from China in the United States

Deepseek began generating rumors in January, when the startup launched its R1 open source reasoning model, which rivals OPENAI O1. According to reports, the model was developed at a fraction of the cost of rival models by OpenAi, Anthrope, Google and others.

Hoffman said that while Depseek could encourage American companies to accelerate the rhythm and share their Suner plans, new revelations do not suggest that large models are a bad investment.

“The competition game is underway,” he said, “but I don't think it's the 'My God, we are losing!' as American technology. “

LOOK: LinkedIn co -founder, Reid Hoffman, in Deepseek