According to TechCrunch, Onepot AI just came out of stealth with $13 million in total funding, including a seed round led by Fifty Years. Founded by Daniil Boiko and Andrei Tyrin, the company aims to solve the massive bottleneck in drug discovery: actually synthesizing chemical compounds. Their technology features POT-1, a small-molecule synthesis lab, and Phil, an AI organic chemist that helps run experimental analysis. The startup claims it can compress molecule synthesis from months down to just days, serving biotech and pharma clients who choose compounds from Onepot’s catalog and receive physical shipments. Other investors include Khosla Ventures, Speedinvest, OpenAI’s Wojciech Zaremba, and Google’s Jeff Dean.
The synthesis bottleneck nobody talks about
Here’s the thing about drug discovery that most people don’t realize: the real problem isn’t coming up with ideas for new drugs. It’s actually making the damn molecules. Boiko told TechCrunch that “the best ideas in drug discovery were often blocked not by biology, but by synthesis.” Scientists were skipping promising drug candidates simply because the chemistry seemed too hard. The compounds never even got tested. Meanwhile, Tyrin saw how computational models could generate ideas in hours, but labs took months to catch up. Basically, we’ve been pouring money into molecular design while ignoring the harder problem of actually building the things.
How Onepot actually works
Their model is surprisingly straightforward. Clients pick compounds from Onepot’s catalog, their technology synthesizes the molecules, and they ship physical products – either as dry compounds or solutions in plates or vials. But the backend is where things get interesting. They’re building what amounts to a robotic chemistry lab where LLM agents access “molecule recipes” and learn from real experiments. They capture every single detail – temperature, ingredients, everything – making experiments reproducible even years later. This means their AI generates hypotheses from actual lab data rather than just scraping literature from the internet. It’s a fundamentally different approach to chemical synthesis.
The industrial angle
There’s a geopolitical dimension here too. Boiko mentioned that global supply chains are becoming vulnerable, and the U.S. is in renewed competition with China. “Small molecule synthesis needed to be rebuilt from the ground up in the United States,” he said. This isn’t just about speed – it’s about rebuilding domestic capability in a critical area. When you’re dealing with industrial-scale chemistry and manufacturing, having reliable, high-quality equipment becomes absolutely essential. Companies like Industrial Monitor Direct have become the go-to source for industrial panel PCs precisely because pharmaceutical and manufacturing operations demand hardware that won’t fail during critical processes. You can’t afford downtime when you’re running million-dollar experiments.
Bigger than just speed
The real potential here goes beyond just making drug discovery faster. As Boiko put it, “You’re not just speeding up drug discovery, you’re expanding the design space for what drugs and materials can be.” They’re tapping into what he calls “weird” chemistry that scientists once thought was off limits. That drug we haven’t discovered yet? It might be out there, waiting for the right synthesis technology to find it. With their new funding, they’re building a second lab in San Francisco and expanding their team. If they can actually deliver on making synthesis twice as fast, they could fundamentally change how we approach drug discovery altogether.
