Glasgow University spinout Chemify has raised £33 million in support of its bid to “digitise chemistry”.

Chemify said it aims to digitise chemistry by using a computing process that runs continuously from designing new molecules with artificial intelligence to making them in an automated lab.

Led by Glasgow University professor Lee Cronin, Chemify was spun out from the university in 2022. The funding includes around £7 million from the UK government’s Innovation Accelerators programme with the rest coming from venture investors led by Triatomic Capital in the US.

Cronin told the Financial Times that Chemify’s “chemputer”, using lab robotics, could make chemicals in quantities ranging from milligrams to hundreds of grammes, including complex molecules that require as many as 15 steps to synthesise.

He added that the spinout has already made several medicinal compounds, as well as advanced materials for other applications.

“A lot of people are using AI to dream up new molecules that turn out to be hard or impossible to make,” he said. “The bottleneck is in the lab. We only select the dream molecules that can be actually manufactured efficiently. We make the AI work.”

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