Qingkui Zhizao Raises ~$14M Series A for Self-Driving Chemistry Labs
Qingkui Zhizao, a Beijing company that calls itself "Physical AI for scientific R&D," has closed a Series A of about RMB 100 million, roughly $14M. "Yi yuan" is the usual Chinese shorthand for around RMB 100M, and the exact amount wasn't disclosed. No lead investor was named either. Cowin Capital, the listed company Frd and Jinhui Big Data all "participated jointly." No valuation. 36Kr newsflash: https://36kr.com/newsflashes/4067555949319041
The product is a self-driving lab. The AI designs an experiment, robots run it in a wet lab, multimodal data comes back, and the model updates itself before the next round. Its NexoLab hardware standardizes the boring hands-on parts of chemistry, like dosing, synthesis, sample handling, analysis and purification, into modules a machine can repeat. The target markets are pharma, chemicals, advanced materials and new energy.
The customer list is more convincing than the pitch: the Chinese Academy of Sciences, Boehringer Ingelheim, Hengrui Medicine and Gotion High-Tech. This year the company also built its own fully automated AI chemistry lab, which does two jobs: it produces training data and it lets the company sell "Experiment as a Service." The money goes to core R&D, expansion into key industries, cloud-lab build-out and getting self-driving labs into real production.
Founded in 2021 by chairman Chen Nanjiang, a Beihang PhD. Put it next to Mirendil's $1B this week, an AI lab where agents do the hands-on research. Language agents can already propose experiments faster than any team. The bottleneck is the robot arm that actually runs them and the data that comes back, and that is the part Qingkui is selling.
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The product is a self-driving lab. The AI designs an experiment, robots run it in a wet lab, multimodal data comes back, and the model updates itself before the next round. Its NexoLab hardware standardizes the boring hands-on parts of chemistry, like dosing, synthesis, sample handling, analysis and purification, into modules a machine can repeat. The target markets are pharma, chemicals, advanced materials and new energy.
The customer list is more convincing than the pitch: the Chinese Academy of Sciences, Boehringer Ingelheim, Hengrui Medicine and Gotion High-Tech. This year the company also built its own fully automated AI chemistry lab, which does two jobs: it produces training data and it lets the company sell "Experiment as a Service." The money goes to core R&D, expansion into key industries, cloud-lab build-out and getting self-driving labs into real production.
Founded in 2021 by chairman Chen Nanjiang, a Beihang PhD. Put it next to Mirendil's $1B this week, an AI lab where agents do the hands-on research. Language agents can already propose experiments faster than any team. The bottleneck is the robot arm that actually runs them and the data that comes back, and that is the part Qingkui is selling.
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