Tim Draper talks with startup founders building an AI platform that designs patient-specific antibodies instead of one-size-fits-all drugs. They discuss how the technology works, early customer feedback, and whether the business model of royalties and B2B SaaS can compete with Big Pharma.
Chapters
What happens when we move more toward personalized medicine and away from Big Pharma? What happens to you guys?
By this question, Tim actually showed that he's interested and he's thinking about the future.
Can you adjust to become more specific to the individual?
For the personalized, the patient has a cancer and he has the specific mutation which presents the— shows the cancer. And our technology will generate the specific antibody against this mutated protein. What is your revenue model? Revenue model is a B2B SaaS.
Do you have to use somebody else's computational biochemistry system in order to apply your AI to it? All AI is our own.
You said you have 3 paying customers. Are they paying you that $3 million?
We have B2C clients. They've paid us. But why we actually use them, because we're a deep tech startup, we need to verify, validate that the market needs it, that researchers need this type of tool.
What are they telling you from those pilots?
They're amazed. They say that this technology, we need that. One thing that we actually give them is ability to choose the region, for example, on the target against which they would like to generate antibodies.
How quickly are you going from them saying they love you to saying, okay, let me sign that $3 million contract?
To be honest, the deal was within 25 minutes. 25 minutes? Yeah, we just had a call. We showed our technologies and we want to use that.
But actually they don't have enough money to generate more revenue, but we can use royalty model if their proteins work out, commercialize.
