Computational chemistry start-up bags $2.1 million in preseed funding

The Boston-based computational chemistry start-up Rowan Scientific has secured $2.1 million in preseed funding from investors including Pillar VC and AI Grant. The firm was formed last year by siblings Corin and Ari Wagen and their friend Eli Mann.

The new venture aims to compete with well-established players in the space, notably Schrödinger. Both firms deploy physics-based computational services that help chemists understand interactions between compounds and protein drug targets. But Corin Wagen, the new firm’s CEO, says Rowan’s tools are built using machine learning (ML) in addition to physics-based methods, enabling users to get the best of both worlds.

“Our method of using ML on quantum mechanics data can predict molecular interactions with high accuracy with relatively low costs,” says Corin, who graduated last year with a PhD in chemistry from Harvard University, where he completed doctoral work in Eric Jacobsen’s laboratory.

Corin says that most computational chemistry competitors use ML sparsely, and predictions made by their ML tools on how compounds and protein drug targets interact aren’t always accurate. Moreover, he says, the accurate ones tend to be time consuming. For instance, predicting the pK _a value of a compound, a parameter helpful in understanding how it might interact with a protein, can take over a month of computing time with state-of-the-art quantum mechanics, he says. “Our platform can speed up these predictions using ML, giving accurate data fairly fast.”

Rowan’s ML models are trained on quantum mechanics data, some from in-house experiments and others from publicly available datasets. Over 800 chemists across the globe already use Rowan’s platform, Corin says.

The Rowan CEO says his goal is to make a tool accessible to a range of chemists, not just experts with PhDs in computational chemistry. The other cofounding Wagen brother, Ari, a business administration graduate from Northeastern University who wears multiple hats at Rowan, writes on LinkedIn profile that the start-up seeks to make computational chemistry services as easy to use as Uber, Venmo, or ChatGPT.