Reid Hoffman launches Manas AI, a new drug discovery startup

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Reid Hoffman, partner at Graylock and the LinkedIn co-founder, speaks during the WSJ Tech Live conference organized by the Wall Street Journal at the Laguna Beach assembly in Laguna Beach, California, October 21, 2024.

Frederic J. Brown | AFP | Getty images

Co-founder of LinkedIn and venture capital Reid Hoffman has become a billionaire of his commercial social work company and has made lucrative bets on businesses, in particular Airbnb and Zynga while supporting the nuclear fusion startup Propeller energy.

Now Hoffman plunges into health care, which he describes as “wonderful and terrifying”, with his last startup, Manas Ai.

Hoffman and Dr. Siddhartha Mukherjee, oncologist and author winner of the Pulitzer Prize, revealed The company on Monday. Manas will use artificial intelligence to try to speed up the drug discovery process, starting with new treatments for aggressive cancer such as prostate cancer, lymphoma and triple negative breast cancer.

Developing new drugs is traditionally an expensive and complex process. He can take over 10 years and cost billions of dollars to develop a single medication, according to a report Dowelly. Manas said he would use his owner chemical libraries and filters fueled by AI to identify drug candidates more quickly, ideally reducing the discovery process from several decades to just a few years.

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

Manas raised $ 24.6 million in seed funding, led by General catalyst And Hoffman with the participation of Greylock, where he is a partner. Hoffman has been deeply in AI in recent years. He was a first investor in Openai, while the project was still a non-profit organization, and he helped start the inflection of the AI ​​with the co-founder Deepmind, Mustafa Suleyman. Last year, Suleyman joined Microsoftwhere Hoffman is a member of the board of directors, as CEO of a new unit called Microsoft AI. Several inflection employees have joined him.

Hear that there is not yet

Manas also signed a partnership with MicrosoftAnd will take advantage of its cloud computation platform Azure. Hoffman, who sold LinkedIn to Microsoft for $ 27 billion, said Manas also deploys 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 has taken steam in the past two months. Hoffman said the team felt ready to publicly share their ambitions this week since its reference, fundamental resources have been in order.

“ Totally delighted ” to see the competition

The company has a long way to go and the drug discovery market is very competitive. Other startups as well as large pharmaceutical companies such as Eli Lilly,, Pfizer And CrippleAlso explore how to take advantage of AI to accelerate the research and development of drugs.

Hoffman said he felt confident in Manas’ approach, although he was “completely delighted” to see several companies flourish.

“We also bring the thing that a startup generally brings, which is a desire to go very strongly, to quickly abandon things that do not work,” he said. “Living as this week counts, 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 that society is in “Building” and “learning and deploying” mode. One of his first initiatives is called Project Cosmos, which is an effort to draw the fundamental rules of the link of drugs, according to the website of the company. Hoffman refused to share additional details on the project.

Manas currently has only four employees – including Hoffman and Mukherjee – but Hoffman said he would grow. He acts like the “guy of the AI” of the company while Mukherjee serves as “organic guy”, he said. In the end, Manas is to merge the two fields.

“It is not only the best of science and it is not only the best of AI, because one of these is insufficient,” said Hoffman. “You must assemble these two.”

As AI guy, Hoffman paid particular attention this week to the sudden emergence of the depth of China in the United States

Deepseek began to generate buzz in January, when the startup published its Open Source R1 model, which competes with the O1 of Openai. The model would have been developed at a fraction of the cost of rival models by Openai, Anthropic, Google and others.

Hoffman said that Deepseek could encourage US companies to speed up and share their plans earlier, new revelations do not suggest that major models are a bad investment.

“The competition game is on,” he said, “but I don’t think it’s” Oh my God, we lose! “As an American technology.”

WATCH: The co-founder of LinkedIn, Reid Hoffman, on Deepseek

The co-founder of LinkedIn, Reid Hoffman: Deepseek Ai proves that this is now a

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