A Seattle-area startup called Pauling.AI is harnessing artificial intelligence to automate the early steps that lead to the discovery of new drugs. The technology can complete tasks in a matter of weeks that previously required three to six months, said founder and CEO Javier Tordable.

Using AI to accelerate research timelines could ultimately spark an exponential increase in new treatments, proponents say.

“The dream of a lot of people in the field would be that, at some point, we’ll go from 30 or 40 new drugs approved every year to 300 or 400,” Tordable said, “and cure all sorts of diseases.”

Tordable launched his company in 2024 after a 16-year tenure at Google, most recently as the technical director of the company’s healthcare and life sciences initiatives. While he doesn’t have expertise in biology or chemistry, Tordable said he’s skilled at building tech tools that can perform complex tasks — such as those required to create new pharmaceuticals.

The startup operates on a “scientist-as-a-service” model, allowing researchers to outsource early steps in the drug discovery process to AI. The platform performs computational chemistry work, engineering drug candidates and modeling how they might interact with molecules and inhibitors within a cell.

The result is a curated list of small-molecule compounds that scientists can then move into a physical laboratory for testing as therapeutics. In the future, the startup would like to produce more complex compounds as drug candidates, such as antibodies.

To accomplish all of this, Pauling is building automation tools that engage with existing large language models and databases from numerous sources.

The startup has six employees who work remotely. Its leadership includes Chief Scientific Officer Oleksandr Savytskyi, a computational biologist who worked in academia in Ukraine and did research at the Mayo Clinic.

Pauling has secured an undisclosed amount of pre-seed funding from Flex Capital and angel investors. It currently serves less than a dozen customers, including several high-profile academic institutions, Tordable said.

The company joins a burgeoning field of AI-biotech ventures, with numerous Pacific Northwest startups: Variational AI in Vancouver, B.C.; Seattle-based Potato and Synthesize Bio; and Xaira Therapeutics, which is based in San Francisco and has labs in Seattle. Additionally, FutureHouse is a California nonprofit in this sphere.

Ultimately, Tordable hopes that by shrinking the time and cost of drug development, it will become economically feasible to tackle rare diseases that are typically not served by big pharma, providing overlooked patients with treatments and cures.

“The nice thing of working in this field is that we’re not necessarily doing it just for economic returns,” Tordable said. “There’s also an enormous benefit to humanity.”