Reid Hoffman, Partner at Greylock and co-founder LinkedIn, speaks in the course of the WSJ Tech Live conference hosted by the Wall Street Journal on the Montage Laguna Beach in Laguna Beach, California, on October 21, 2024.
Frederic J. Brown | Afp | Getty Images
LinkedIn co-founder and enterprise capitalist Reid Hoffman became a billionaire from his business social-working company, and has made lucrative bets on firms including Airbnb and Zynga while also backing nuclear fusion startup Helion Energy.
Now Hoffman is diving into the health care, which he describes as “wondrous and terrifying,” together with his latest startup, Manas AI.Â
Hoffman and Dr. Siddhartha Mukherjee, an oncologist and Pulitzer Prize-winning writer, unveiled the corporate on Monday. Manas will use artificial intelligence to attempt to speed up the drug discovery process, starting with latest treatments for aggressive cancers like prostate cancer, lymphoma and triple-negative breast cancer.Â
Developing latest drugs is traditionally a costly and sophisticated process. It might take greater than 10 years and value billions of dollars to develop a single medication, in response to a report from Deloitte. Manas said it can use its proprietary chemical libraries and AI-powered filters to discover drug candidates more quickly, ideally reducing the decades-long discovery process to only just a few years.
“Most individuals have had friends, members of the family, etc., who’ve died from cancer or had serious cancer problems,” Hoffman told CNBC in an interview this week. “If we will make an enormous difference on this, and that is the type of thing that AI could make an enormous difference in, it is the type of reason why AI might be great for humanity.”
Manas raised $24.6 million in seed funding, led by General Catalyst and Hoffman with participation from Greylock, where he’s a partner. Hoffman has been deep in AI lately. He was an early investor in OpenAI, when the project was still a nonprofit, and he helped start Inflection AI together with DeepMind co-founder Mustafa Suleyman. Last 12 months, Suleyman joined Microsoft, where Hoffman is a board member, as CEO of a latest unit called Microsoft AI. Several Inflection employees joined him.
Manas has also inked a partnership with Microsoft, and can leverage its Azure cloud-computing platform. Hoffman, who sold LinkedIn to Microsoft for $27 billion, said Manas is deploying several additional tools from Microsoft as well, including some that will not be generally available to the general public yet.Â
Hoffman has been working with Mukherjee to create Manas for a few 12 months, though the method picked up steam within the last couple months. Hoffman said the team felt able to publicly share its ambitions this week since its baseline, foundational resources are so as.Â
‘Totally delighted’ to see competition
The corporate has an extended road ahead, and the drug discovery market may be very competitive. Other startups together with major pharmaceutical firms like Eli Lilly, Pfizer and Merck, are also exploring find out how to leverage AI to speed up drug research and development. Â
Hoffman said he feels confident in Manas’s approach, though he could be “totally delighted” to see multiple firms flourish.Â
“We also bring the thing that a startup normally brings, which is a willingness to go very hard, abandon things quickly that are not working,” he said. “Live like this week matters, and the results of this week matters.”Â
Following Manas’s launch on Monday, five different potential strategic partners have already approached the corporate, Hoffman said. Â
Hoffman said the corporate is in “construct quickly” and “learn and deploy” mode. Certainly one of its early initiatives known as Project Cosmos, which is an effort to map out the elemental rules of drug binding, in response to the corporate’s website. Hoffman declined to share any additional details in regards to the project.Â
Manas currently has just 4 employees – including Hoffman and Mukherjee – but Hoffman said it can grow. He’s been acting as the corporate’s “AI guy” while Mukherjee serves because the “bio guy,” he said. Ultimately, Manas is about melding the 2 fields. Â
“It is not only the most effective of science and it is not only the most effective of AI, because either of those two are insufficient,” Hoffman said. “You might want to put those two together.”
Because the AI guy, Hoffman was paying close attention this week to the sudden emergence of China’s DeepSeek within the U.S.
DeepSeek began generating buzz in January, when the startup released its open-source reasoning model R1, which rivals OpenAI’s o1. The model was reportedly developed at a fraction of the fee of rival models by OpenAI, Anthropic, Google and others.
Hoffman said that while DeepSeek might encourage American firms to select up the pace and share their plans sooner, the brand new revelations don’t suggest that enormous models are a foul investment.
“The competition game is on,” he said, “But I do not think it is the ‘Oh my God, we’re losing!’ as American technology.”
WATCH: LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman on DeepSeek
