Israeli AI platform for accelerated drug discovery and development company Converge Bio, announced today the completion of a $25 million Series A financing round led by Bessemer Venture Partners, with participation from TLV Partners, Vintage Investment Partners and Saras Capital, as well as executives from Meta, OpenAI and Wiz. This brings the total amount raised by the company to $30 million.
Over a dozen pharma and biotech customers already use Converge's solutions for target discovery, antibody design, and protein manufacturing optimization.
Converge Bio CEO Dov Gertz said, "The conversation needs to shift from models to AI systems. Unlike ChatGPT, you can’t simply prompt a model and get useful results. There’s a long road from a model that performs well on benchmarks to an AI system a biologist can actually use. It requires high-quality data, the right architectures for the domain, and a tight experimental validation loop. That's why the vast majority of drug development is still done the old way: through trial and error, taking years and costing hundreds of millions of dollars."
Converge's platform combines multiple proprietary models into an end-to-end system that plugs directly into existing drug development workflows. Biologists use the platform to get actionable outputs, like novel drug targets, optimized antibody candidates, or protein sequences optimized for increased yield, without needing to write code or build infrastructure. The company's models are experimentally validated and trained on Converge's large scale datasets, obtained from their high throughput screening, acquisition of data at scale and rigorous curation of public data. Customers can also use their own proprietary data to create private, fine-tuned instances of Converge's models while retaining full ownership.
The approach is already delivering results across multiple therapeutic areas, including oncology, neurodegenerative, and autoimmune diseases. In the past year, Converge completed over 40 programs with pharmaceutical and biotech companies. These efforts have enabled partners to discover novel antibodies with strong (single-digit nanomolar) binding affinities, consistently improve protein manufacturing yields by 4 to 7x, and identify novel molecular biomarkers to optimize patient response.
Gertz added, "The AI drug discovery revolution is here. Our goal is simple: make every biotech and pharma company an AI company. We make it easy for scientists to identify where AI can deliver real results for them today, and provide them with our validated tools to get there."
Published by Globes, Israel business news - en.globes.co.il - on January 13, 2026.
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