Litai Intelligent Pharma has completed a seed round financing of nearly 50 million yuan, committed to building an AI-native peptide drug R&D platform.

AI-native polypeptide drug R&D enterprise LigIT (LiTai Intelligent Pharma) announces the completion of a seed round financing of nearly 50 million yuan. This round is jointly invested by iFlytek Venture Capital, L2F Lighthouse Founders' Fund and well-known industrial partners, with Lighthouse Capital acting as the exclusive financial advisor. The funds will be mainly used for core pipeline R&D, computing power investment, patent layout, talent recruitment and daily operations.

LigIT is an AI-native innovative polypeptide drug R&D enterprise, focusing on applying generative AI technology to carry out novel polypeptide drug design. The company was founded by Dr. Jia Yinjun, a post-98s generation entrepreneur. During his tenure as a postdoctoral researcher at the Institute for AI Industry Research (AIR), Tsinghua University, he has published many influential works in top journals including Science and Cell, and has a number of original achievements in the fields of AI molecular screening and polypeptide generation. The company's core team brings together cross-disciplinary talents in AI algorithms, polypeptide chemistry, and novel drug R&D, and is equipped with a matrix of senior academic and industrial consultants to support the implementation and transformation of technologies.

At present, polypeptide drugs, especially cyclic peptide drugs, are ushering in an industrial window, but their R&D has long faced industry pain points such as scarcity of public structural data, difficulty in scaling models, and insufficient in vivo stability of natural polypeptides. LigIT has built a three-layer technical system covering data, model and molecule to try to solve the above bottlenecks: relying on self-developed large-scale closed-source polypeptide synthesis datasets, polypeptide generation large models that follow the Scaling Law of large models, and mirror polypeptide generation elements to break the seesaw dilemma between polypeptide affinity and stability. In addition, LigIT has also built a 72-hour polypeptide generation-synthesis closed-loop platform, covering the full process of AI design, chemical synthesis, biological testing and structural analysis for polypeptide drugs, including linear peptides and cyclic peptides. At present, the platform has completed verification on multiple tumor and metabolism-related targets, fully proving the real effectiveness of AI design.

In terms of commercialization, LigIT adopts a dual-engine model of "Platform + Pipeline", which takes into account short-term technology monetization and long-term value growth, and gradually upgrades to an AI-native pharmaceutical company. In the short term, the company realizes technology monetization through platform cooperation and joint R&D. At present, it has established cooperation with a number of listed pharmaceutical enterprises, biotechnology companies, Class A tertiary hospitals and national key laboratories, and some projects have entered the preclinical testing stage. In the long run, the company focuses on independent development of novel drug pipelines, and lays out three high-value tracks of oncology, autoimmunity and metabolism. The company is positioned as an AI-native pharmaceutical enterprise, not a pure AI technology service provider, with the ultimate goal of delivering innovative polypeptide drugs for patients.

Founder Dr. Jia Yinjun said: "The release of AlphaFold2 in 2020 made me intuitively feel the disruptive power of AI on biomedicine. Starting from predicting protein structures, AI can amplify everyone's scientific research capabilities, and in the future may help us understand more diseases and find corresponding solutions. Polypeptide is a highly potential drug modality, which is expected to challenge many traditional "undruggable" targets, and the breakthrough of oral cyclic peptide technology has further opened up a brand new market space. AI is no longer just an auxiliary tool for R&D, but the core driving force of drug design. After this round of financing, the team will continue to iterate the polypeptide generation large model, promote preclinical research of self-owned and cooperative pipelines, actively explore global cooperation, and strive to grow into a China-based AI-native innovative polypeptide pharmaceutical enterprise, so that cutting-edge technologies can benefit more patients."

Xu Jingming, Chairman of iFlytek Venture Capital said: "With the penetration of artificial intelligence technology, the paradigm of scientific research and development is also undergoing innovation. AI4bio has become the first verified scenario in the AI4S field due to its high data density, high project value, mature IP payment model and other factors, and it is also one of the key directions that iFlytek Venture Capital focuses on in recent years. LigIT chooses polypeptide drugs, a programmable intermediate state between small molecules and antibodies, as the entry point, which has both innovation potential and broad market prospects. Founder Dr. Jia Yinjun has several top journal publications right after graduation, who is innovative and pragmatic. The core team has long-term accumulation in generative AI, de novo polypeptide design and synthesis. We believe that the AI Native concept adhered to by LigIT is expected to become an important driving force to improve the efficiency and success rate of drug R&D, create long-term value for the life and health industry, and become an innovative enterprise with international competitiveness."

Zheng Xuanle, Founding Partner of L2F Lighthouse Founders' Fund said: "Polypeptides have attracted attention due to their drug development potential, and AI technology can provide them with scalable design capabilities to accelerate the innovation process. In the future, a number of new companies with AI as the R&D base will emerge in the pharmaceutical industry, accumulating design capabilities through each experiment and forming long-term advantages in continuous iteration. LigIT exactly embodies such potential. The team takes polypeptides as the entry point and extends to the non-natural polypeptide design space, reflecting independent judgment on the technical direction and drug value. From basic research to real drugs, it is necessary to cross the barriers of experiment and transformation. We expect LigIT to transform continuous scientific research accumulation into the ability to continuously produce innovative molecules, and build its own ecological niche in global drug R&D."

Hong Lei, Head of the Smart Life Sciences Group & Partner of Lighthouse Capital, and Jiang Xiang, Executive Director said: "We are very glad to help the company complete the seed round financing. AI pharma is moving from auxiliary drug discovery to native molecular design. Relying on its own polypeptide data asset base, LigIT takes the polypeptide generation large model with continuous iteration and scalable expansion capabilities as the core, and achieves zero-to-one breakthroughs in cutting-edge directions such as mirror polypeptide design. We are optimistic about the company's differentiated advantages in model and synthesis capabilities, and also look forward to LigIT linking high-quality capital in the future and growing into a benchmark enterprise in the AI-native polypeptide drug sector."

Huang Xuequn, Executive Director of L2F Lighthouse Founders' Fund said: "The important opportunity of AI for Science lies in breaking through the long-standing R&D bottlenecks of the industry, so that scientific discovery has the ability of continuous iteration and large-scale expansion. Polypeptide is a key entry point. With the interdisciplinary background of medicine, life science and AI, the team connects technical exploration with real drug demands, and forms systematic accumulation in data construction, generation models and experimental verification: expanding the model learning space through synthetic data, improving molecular design capabilities, and extending to D-type mirror peptides. We expect the team to build an AI-native platform that continuously produces original drugs, and transform China's scientific research innovation into globally competitive industrial value."