PostEra

–Most start-ups wouldn’t employ the strategy that PostEra has. In fact, many of its business decisions seem counterintuitive. PostEra owns little to no intellectual property (IP) on its early work, instead making that science open source. The company also hasn’t raised any venture capital funds since a series A round 3 years ago. Its most high-profile work so far is as a collaborator on the philanthropic open-science COVID Moonshot initiative, which put software tools to use designing antivirals for SARS-CoV-2, the coronavirus that causes COVID-19.But for PostEra, the strategy has worked. Since opening for business in the US in early 2020, the company has caught the eye of the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) and Big Pharma firms Pfizer and Amgen, which have collectively agreed to infuse PostEra with more than $1 billion to use artificial intelligence to discover drugs beyond antivirals. Cofounders Aaron Morris and Alpha Lee are now talking about beefing up PostEra’s own drug development pipeline and even getting a wet lab—they’re a far cry from the baby-faced coders they once were who designed antivirals from an Airbnb.“Some of those really fortuitous events, like the open-science COVID Moonshot, like the NIH grant, we wouldn’t make a dollar of profit from any of that, but it gave us some of the best industry validation for our AI possible, because we had nothing to hide,” Morris says. “There was no IP. It was just a great case study to show, ‘Hey, AI is working in the real world.’