Earendil Labs has secured $787m to drive the expansion of its artificial intelligence (AI)-powered drug discovery platform, which has already garnered interest from big pharma player, Sanofi.
Investment has come from participants Dimension Capital and Pfizer & Hillhouse’s Biotech Development Fund, as well as partner Sanofi. With the funding, the Delaware-based company will expand its team of scientists, engineers and translational experts, while boosting the utility of its AI-driven R&D platform.
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According to the biotech’s CEO, Jian Peng, the capital raised will allow Earendil to operate on a “fundamentally different scale”, meaning the company will now be able to progress its arsenal of more than 40 programmes.
The current star of Earendil’s pipeline is its half-life extended anti-tumour necrosis factor-like cytokine 1A (TL1A) therapy, HXN-1001, which is ready to enter Phase II development across inflammatory bowel diseases like Crohn’s and ulcerative colitis (UC). The biotech previously conducted a Phase I trial on HXN-1001 in healthy volunteers back in July 2025.
According to GlobalData’s Pharmaceutical Intelligence Center, there are currently 10 TIL1A-targeting therapies in development for autoimmune diseases across the preclinical and clinical landscape. This includes Roche-owned Genentech’s afimkibart, as well as MSD’s tulisokibart, which GlobalData, parent company of Pharmaceutical Technology, estimates will generate $2bn in sales during 2032.
Alongside its efforts to progress HXN-1001, Earendil plans to submit investigational new drug (IND) applications for several of its preclinical assets throughout 2026 and 2027.
Sanofi’s contribution to this financing deepens ties between the two companies, as the duo previously inked a $2.56bn deal to discover and develop candidates for autoimmune and inflammatory conditions in January 2026. This pact followed on from Sanofi and Earendil’s first blockbuster agreement, which saw the former buy the rights to two of Earendil’s bispecific antibody programmes in April 2025.
AI a key financing theme for biotech
As AI continues to advance the drug discovery paradigm, several pharma companies are investing into AI capabilities to bolster their pipelines.
This has become particularly important for many, as upcoming patent cliffs threaten to wipe out $230bn from the US market between 2025 and 2030, as per a report from GlobalData.
While many are opting to advance their AI technologies in-house, AI-focused deals have also been rising in prevalence, with 168 strategic alliances related to the technology signed in 2025 alone, as per GlobalData.
This includes a partnership between Eli Lilly and NVIDIA to build pharma’s “most powerful” supercomputer, which the companies will use to identify novel medicines. The pair will also apply the technology across planning, medical imaging and creating manufacturing processes.
In a survey conducted for another GlobalData report from earlier this year, pharmaceutical professionals ranked AI’s role in the pharma value chain as the factor that will have the greatest impact on the industry in 2026.
