Reid Hoffman, Sharer at Greylock and co-founder LinkedIn, speaks during the WSJ Tech Live conference hosted by the Wall Street Journal at the Montage Laguna Seashore in Laguna Beach, California, on October 21, 2024.
Frederic J. Brown | Afp | Getty Images
LinkedIn co-founder and venture capitalist Reid Hoffman enhanced a billionaire from his business social-working company, and has made lucrative bets on companies including Airbnb and Zynga while also assistance nuclear fusion startup Helion Energy.
Now Hoffman is diving into the health care, which he describes as “wondrous and frightening,” with his latest startup, Manas AI.
Hoffman and Dr. Siddhartha Mukherjee, an oncologist and Pulitzer Prize-winning author, unveiled the crowd on Monday. Manas will use artificial intelligence to try and accelerate the drug discovery process, starting with new treatments for assertive cancers like prostate cancer, lymphoma and triple-negative breast cancer.
Developing new drugs is traditionally a costly and complex convert. It can take more than 10 years and cost billions of dollars to develop a single medication, according to a bang from Deloitte. Manas said it will use its proprietary chemical libraries and AI-powered filters to identify drug entrants more quickly, ideally reducing the decades-long discovery process to just a few years.
“Most people have had bosom buddies, family members, etc., who’ve died from cancer or had serious cancer problems,” Hoffman told CNBC in an interview this week. “If we can manufacture a huge difference on this, and this is the kind of thing that AI can make a huge difference in, it’s the kind of reason why AI can be brilliant for humanity.”
Manas raised $24.6 million in seed funding, led by General Catalyst and Hoffman with participation from Greylock, where he is a helpmate. Hoffman has been deep in AI in recent years. He was an early investor in OpenAI, when the project was still a nonprofit, and he expropriated start Inflection AI along with DeepMind co-founder Mustafa Suleyman. Last year, Suleyman joined Microsoft, where Hoffman is a take meals member, as CEO of a new unit called Microsoft AI. Several Inflection employees joined him.
Manas has also inked a partnership with Microsoft, and compel leverage its Azure cloud-computing platform. Hoffman, who sold LinkedIn to Microsoft for $27 billion, said Manas is deploying a few additional tools from Microsoft as well, including some that are not generally available to the public yet.
Hoffman has been assignment with Mukherjee to create Manas for about a year, though the process picked up steam in the last couple months. Hoffman said the set felt ready to publicly share its ambitions this week since its baseline, foundational resources are in order.
‘Wholly delighted’ to see competition
The company has a long road ahead, and the drug discovery market is very competitive. Other startups along with bigger pharmaceutical companies like Eli Lilly, Pfizer and Merck, are also exploring how to leverage AI to accelerate drug research and happening.
Hoffman said he feels confident in Manas’s approach, though he would be “totally delighted” to see multiple companies frill.
“We also bring the thing that a startup usually brings, which is a willingness to go very hard, abandon matters quickly that aren’t working,” he said. “Live like this week matters, and the result of this week episodes.”
Following Manas’s launch on Monday, five different potential strategic partners have already approached the society, Hoffman said.
Hoffman said the company is in “build quickly” and “learn and deploy” mode. One of its early initiatives is rebuke a demanded Project Cosmos, which is an effort to map out the fundamental rules of drug binding, according to the company’s website. Hoffman inclined to share any additional details about the project.
Manas currently has just four employees – including Hoffman and Mukherjee – but Hoffman verbalized it will grow. He’s been acting as the company’s “AI guy” while Mukherjee serves as the “bio guy,” he said. Ultimately, Manas is about melding the two lawns.
“It isn’t just the best of science and it isn’t just the best of AI, because either of those two are insufficient,” Hoffman said. “You need to put those two together.”
As the AI guy, Hoffman was settle close attention this week to the sudden emergence of China’s DeepSeek in the U.S.
DeepSeek began generating buzz in January, when the startup freed its open-source reasoning model R1, which rivals OpenAI’s o1. The model was reportedly developed at a fraction of the cost of rival brands by OpenAI, Anthropic, Google and others.
Hoffman said that while DeepSeek might encourage American companions to pick up the pace and share their plans sooner, the new revelations don’t suggest that large models are a bad investment.
“The rivalry game is on,” he said, “But I don’t think it’s the ‘Oh my God, we’re losing!’ as American technology.”
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