South Korea's HITZ raises $13 million Series B for its AI drug-research agent
What's the deal? HITZDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom →, a South Korean AI-driven drug development company, has raised US$15.3M in a Series B round. Premier PartnersDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom →, Korea Investment PartnersDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom →, and Uan Tai Investment backed the round.
What's the endgame? Founded in 2020 by KAISTDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom → chemistry professor Kim Woo-yeon, HITZ built HyperLab, a platform for discovering and designing new drug candidates, and recently commercialised K-Fold, a bio-AI model developed with KAIST researchers. It will use the new funds to advance its technology, improve products, and expand work with pharmaceutical and biotech firms.
The product: HITZ plans to launch its AI Co-Scientist in November and connect it to automated laboratory equipment by 2027. The tool assigns roles such as literature search, data analysis, and prediction to multiple AI agents, drawing on specialised models for protein structure prediction, toxicity analysis, and molecular design.
Why now? Drug research runs through many stages — target selection, data verification, and hypothesis refinement. HITZ expanded from building individual models to a single workflow that streamlines those steps.
Co-founder and chief AI officer Lim Jae-chang compared the approach to a soccer team: "It's similar to assigning roles like forwards, midfielders, and defenders rather than letting 11 players run freely." He said designing agents tailored to research and building drug-discovery models separate from general large language models is "the core of our technology."
By the numbers: HyperLab Co-Scientist scored 94% on the BixBench-Verified-50 bioinformatics test, 84% on the Frontier Science Olympiad, and 69.7% on Anthropic's BioMysteryBench. Of 36 employees, 19 hold PhDs or master's degrees. Including this round, HITZ has raised US$24M to date, up from US$8.64M after its Series A Bridge in 2024.
The signal: HITZ is betting that specialised, verifiable AI agents — not general chatbots — will win in scientific research, where a small error can be fatal. Its pitch of a combined bio-and-AI team reflects a wider race to embed AI across the full drug-discovery pipeline.
Read more: chosun.com
Image credit: IBM Research
