FundedPulseRewriting the Rules of Drug Design
For decades, pharmaceutical companies have been limited by a fundamental constraint: most drugs work by blocking a single protein's active site, like jamming a key in a lock. The problem? An estimated 85%% of disease-causing proteins don't have a suitable lock to jam. They've been considered undruggable.
Proxima, led by co-founder and CEO Zachary Carpenter, is changing that by pioneering proximity-based therapeutics — drugs that work by physically forcing proteins to interact with each other (or forcing them apart). At the core of their platform is NeoLink, a data-generation technology that maps how proteins interact at a scale never before possible, paired with their Neo AI model series for end-to-end molecule design.
The Validation Is Real
This isn't just academic research. Proxima has secured multibillion-dollar collaborations with Johnson %26 Johnson, Bristol Myers Squibb, and Blueprint Medicines (now Sanofi). Multiple co-developed programs are advancing toward clinical trials in 2026. The $80M oversubscribed seed round, led by DCVC with backing from NVIDIA's NVentures, gives them the resources to accelerate their own internal pipeline alongside these partnerships.