ReactWise raises $3.4M to slash drug manufacturing with self-driving labs
Bringing a new drug to market is a race against time. It takes 12 to 15 years to develop a treatment, and every day saved can mean timely access to life-saving therapies for patients — as well as millions in additional revenue for pharmaceutical companies that get there first.
Yet, behind the scenes, drug manufacturing is still driven by trial-and-error. Most chemists lack training in coding and have yet to take advantage of AI’s potential, relying instead on slow, manual experimentation.
Cohort 7 ReactWise, founded in 2024 by Alexander Pomberger and Daniel Wigh, is tackling this problem with an AI co-pilot for chemical process optimisation — a no-code platform that helps chemists refine drug manufacturing workflows up to 30x faster and more efficiently.
For Pomberger, drug manufacturing is a bit like baking a cake — except instead of perfecting taste and texture by discovering the perfect balance of ingredients, chemists experiment with reaction times, catalysts and temperatures to maximise yield and reduce impurities.
“Every time a new drug comes on the market, it needs to be manufactured on a kilogram scale to run clinical trials, and in doing so, you need to find a scalable industrial process that works,” Pomberger says.
Both trained in machine learning for chemistry at the University of Cambridge, Pomberger and Wigh experienced this challenge firsthand while working in the industry. They began developing ReactWise during their PhD, starting their journey at Conception X to translate their idea from pure research into a scalable company.
The platform combines advanced AI with proprietary data generated in their self-driving lab, where decisions are made autonomously and lab robots execute and analyse the experiments without human intervention — paving the way for autonomous discovery.
Their vision? A future where new drug manufacturing processes are optimised in days instead of months.
“We want to get to the point where we have these fully trained powerful models based on our in-house data, and we can give clients a prediction for the ideal manufacturing process in one or two shots, without any prior knowledge of the specific process they’re working on,” Pomberger says.
ReactWise focuses on a critical step in the long drug discovery process: every day saved in chemical drug manufacturing “directly translates into one day earlier in clinical trials, which obviously speeds up the time to market,” Wigh explains.
The team is already working with 12 large pharma clients and is generating revenue. This week, the two founders announced the closing of a $3.4 million round, backed by Y Combinator, a £1.2 million Innovate UK grant, and a set of unnamed angel investors, corporate VCs and family offices.
The raise will go towards team expansion — starting with a machine learning engineer and an additional software engineer — and improving software capabilities to enable robotic and fully autonomous labs.
>> Get in touch with the team to learn more about job opportunities
