For Daniil Boiko and Andrei Tyrin, the idea for Onepot AI came from the same frustration.
“The best ideas in drug discovery were often blocked not by biology, but by synthesis,” Boiko told TechCrunch. Synthesis is the creation of new molecules by using chemical reactions. It’s like a recipe or Lego pieces, where small pieces, ingredients, molecules, come together to form a wider puzzle picture, a food dish, a larger molecule.
As one might expect, it’s quite hard to create those small molecules that go on to build bigger ones.
For Boiko, a Ph.D. candidate studying machine learning in chemistry at Carnegie Mellon (he received his bachelor’s and master’s in organic chemistry from a university in Russia), that meant realizing that drug hunters — the scientists who oversee drug discovery and development — were skipping promising ideas just because the chemical molecules to create the drugs seemed too hard to make.
“The compounds never even got a chance to be tested,” Boiko told TechCrunch.
For Tyrin (who received his bachelor’s in computer science at MIT), his time working on drug discovery computational pipelines made him realize how behind the world of drug discovery was. “The models could generate ideas in hours, but it could take months for the lab to catch up,” he told TechCrunch.
“We both saw that the world was throwing money into molecular design and almost ignoring the harder problem of actually making the molecules,” Boiko said. But there was a geopolitical angle too, he continued, global supply chains are becoming vulnerable, and the U.S. is entering a trade war and innovative competition, once again, with China.
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“It was clear,” Boiko said. “Small molecule synthesis needed to be rebuilt from the ground up in the United States.”
Boiko and Tyrin came together to create Onepot, a company that is home to the small-molecule synthesis lab POT-1. They also built Phil, an AI organic chemist, to help run experimental analysis to increase the process of compound synthesis for their early commercial partners. Those partners are biotech and pharma companies that are currently trying out their technology.
On Wednesday, the company came out of stealth with $13 million of funding, including pre-seed money, and a seed round led by Fifty Years.
“Currently, pharma and biotech companies either build entire teams of chemists in-house or work with contract research organizations overseas,” Tryin said of the process for molecular synthesis. Human chemists can spend months of research to create even a single compound, at a cost of thousands of dollars.
It involves a lot of trial and error — studying various compounds, collecting data on biological activity, how the drug moves through the body, toxicology reports, and coming up with what to experiment with next. “The main limiting factor here is not testing these compounds, but making them in the first place,” Tyrin continued. “We aim to compress this down to days.”
Tyrin said the product is pretty straightforward. Onepot has a catalogue of molecules it can make. Clients choose which compounds it want and then Onepot’s technology will synthesize the molecules and then ship them to the customer so the customer can use them in their own experiments. (They ship physical products either as dry compounds of solutions in plates or vials).
The backend of the product is where Boiko and Tyrin have fun, dissecting the problems of chemical synthesis to find out which combinations of molecules work together. They built a lab where they are letting LLM agents access these so-called molecule recipes for training so the agents can also find out what works and doesn’t in compound building.
“When executing experiments in the lab, we capture every single detail that goes into the process,” Tyrin said — that means tracing temperature and, essentially, the ingredients that were added to a mixture to create compounds. “No information is lost, which makes experiences reproducible even if someone decides to run them in ten years from now.”
This also means their agents generate hypotheses from real-world experiments rather than literature data, often mined from the internet.
Boiko called the fundraising process “hectic,” and said they met their lead investor through an intro. “What was supposed to be a short meeting turned into a multi-hour whiteboard session about industrializing synthesis,” Boiko said. Others in the round include Khosla Ventures, Speedinvest, OpenAI co-founder Wojciech Zaremba and Google’s Chief Scientist Jeff Dean.
The fresh capital will be used to build a second lab in San Francisco so the team can take on more customers. It will also expand the team and its compound discovery engine. On the service side, Boiko and Tyrin look at WuXi AppTec and Enamine as competitors.
Overall, Boiko and Tyrin hope to make drug discovery at least two times faster and hopefully change the perception of what is possible after one taps into the “weird” chemistry that scientists once thought was off limits.
“You’re not just speeding up drug discovery, you’re expanding the design space for what drugs and materials can be,” Boiko said. “That drug that we haven’t discovered yet, might be out there, waiting for us to find it.”
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![‘My Adventures With Superman’ Creators Talk New Kara/Jimmy Super Ship
The second season of Adult Swim’s My Adventures With Superman introduced Supergirl, and it didn’t take long for her to become a fan-favorite. Starting off as a soldier and the adoptive daughter of Brainiac before joining her cousin to defend Earth, Kara’s back for season three—and much like Clark and their friends, she’s got some stuff to figure out. Kara’s arc this season is about her settling into becoming Metropolis’ newest protector and sorting out where she and Jimmy stand. Last season made it clear there were sparks on both sides, but in classic romantic tension fashion, neither have revealed their feelings in full. Jimmy thinks Kara should at least become more adjusted to Earth, which she plans to do…by going on dates with other people. This week’s episode, “All’s Fair in Love and W.O.R.M.S.,” sees Kara consult Lois for help with her many matches on dating apps. Meanwhile, Jimmy goes on a date in the hopes of making his Kryptonian friend jealous, with a slight problem: his date, Doris, is actually “Gigi,” aka Giganta, the popular Wonder Woman villain. And in a very Jimmy situation, she’s both into him and wants to run a few experiments on him, including turning him into a wolf.
Before the season’s premiere, io9 talked with co-showrunners Jake Wyatt and Brendan Clogher about the show’s other love story. While Kara and Jimmy get paired up every once in a while in comics or other media, Wyatt noted they’re not a “near-sacred pop culture thing” like Clark and Lois. As such, My Adventures With Superman is free to put its younger duo through more stress and modern dating troubles. But it’s not just a matter of testing Kara and Jimmy with one obstacle after another.
[embed]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cbfUC3-qU8s[/embed] Every relationship faces trials that can often make one half—or even both halves—look bad. Putting Kara and Jimmy in various situations on the path to love is part of the show’s DNA, but he and Wyatt said there’s a limit to what can be done without betraying who these characters are. “It’s a tightrope to keep audience credibility with these two and keep them likable,” Clogher acknowledged. “Supergirl is Supergirl, but we can bend the rules a bit more with Jimmy. He’s emotionally intelligent, but it’s easier to like him when he’s being bad.” “Jimmy’s off being goofus so Kara can be gallant,” added Wyatt. “If Clark and Lois are the romcom, these two are romantic chaos.” The popular manga and anime Ranma 1/2 was cited as a source for the latter term, and it definitely applies. With Jimmy’s love life taking center stage this season, the team knew they wanted him to have an arc of dating mad-scientists, which would let them turn him into animals as he had in the comics. While doing story revisions on “W.O.R.M.S.,” they realized the episode needed a bigger set piece for the third act—a “King Kong moment,” if you will—but the initial villain they had couldn’t really lead to that escalation.
So Giganta was added, allowing for a scene where she changes her size and kidnaps Jimmy before climbing a skyscraper with plans to make him just like her. Wyatt said DC “played ball really well” when it came to including her, and has generally been a good partner in that regard, including getting the Whip in last week’s episode. “Some of [our villains] are about DC notes,” he explained. “Other times, it was with DC assistance.” We won’t spoil Jimmy’s next date, but know that the character was also done with some DC advice, and they’re even more ridiculous than Giganta—and more trying on Kara. [embed]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PCq12i5r3Ug[/embed] Speaking of her, io9 asked if there were any plans to put Kara in some romantic hijinks of her own outside of Jimmy’s orbit. The pair admitted that yes, the team had episode ideas where she’d go on dates, from Steve Lombard to some supervillains. “Those [villain dates] would’ve ended in swift and violent justice,” said Wyatt, which sounds like a riot. Unfortunately, these ideas were some of many in the season to be cut, so the team opted to give Kara a more serious arc of coming into her own as a hero. That journey, part of which involves her little fangirl Jessica Cruz, will play out as My Adventures With Superman continues with new episodes this summer. But if the show comes back for season four, maybe then we’ll see the Woman of Tomorrow make some bad romantic choices. Want more io9 news? Check out when to expect the latest Marvel, Star Wars, and Star Trek releases, what’s next for the DC Universe on film and TV, and everything you need to know about the future of Doctor Who. #Adventures #Superman #Creators #Talk #KaraJimmy #Super #ShipJimmy Olsen,My Adventures with Superman,Supergirl,Superman ‘My Adventures With Superman’ Creators Talk New Kara/Jimmy Super Ship
The second season of Adult Swim’s My Adventures With Superman introduced Supergirl, and it didn’t take long for her to become a fan-favorite. Starting off as a soldier and the adoptive daughter of Brainiac before joining her cousin to defend Earth, Kara’s back for season three—and much like Clark and their friends, she’s got some stuff to figure out. Kara’s arc this season is about her settling into becoming Metropolis’ newest protector and sorting out where she and Jimmy stand. Last season made it clear there were sparks on both sides, but in classic romantic tension fashion, neither have revealed their feelings in full. Jimmy thinks Kara should at least become more adjusted to Earth, which she plans to do…by going on dates with other people. This week’s episode, “All’s Fair in Love and W.O.R.M.S.,” sees Kara consult Lois for help with her many matches on dating apps. Meanwhile, Jimmy goes on a date in the hopes of making his Kryptonian friend jealous, with a slight problem: his date, Doris, is actually “Gigi,” aka Giganta, the popular Wonder Woman villain. And in a very Jimmy situation, she’s both into him and wants to run a few experiments on him, including turning him into a wolf.
Before the season’s premiere, io9 talked with co-showrunners Jake Wyatt and Brendan Clogher about the show’s other love story. While Kara and Jimmy get paired up every once in a while in comics or other media, Wyatt noted they’re not a “near-sacred pop culture thing” like Clark and Lois. As such, My Adventures With Superman is free to put its younger duo through more stress and modern dating troubles. But it’s not just a matter of testing Kara and Jimmy with one obstacle after another.
[embed]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cbfUC3-qU8s[/embed] Every relationship faces trials that can often make one half—or even both halves—look bad. Putting Kara and Jimmy in various situations on the path to love is part of the show’s DNA, but he and Wyatt said there’s a limit to what can be done without betraying who these characters are. “It’s a tightrope to keep audience credibility with these two and keep them likable,” Clogher acknowledged. “Supergirl is Supergirl, but we can bend the rules a bit more with Jimmy. He’s emotionally intelligent, but it’s easier to like him when he’s being bad.” “Jimmy’s off being goofus so Kara can be gallant,” added Wyatt. “If Clark and Lois are the romcom, these two are romantic chaos.” The popular manga and anime Ranma 1/2 was cited as a source for the latter term, and it definitely applies. With Jimmy’s love life taking center stage this season, the team knew they wanted him to have an arc of dating mad-scientists, which would let them turn him into animals as he had in the comics. While doing story revisions on “W.O.R.M.S.,” they realized the episode needed a bigger set piece for the third act—a “King Kong moment,” if you will—but the initial villain they had couldn’t really lead to that escalation.
So Giganta was added, allowing for a scene where she changes her size and kidnaps Jimmy before climbing a skyscraper with plans to make him just like her. Wyatt said DC “played ball really well” when it came to including her, and has generally been a good partner in that regard, including getting the Whip in last week’s episode. “Some of [our villains] are about DC notes,” he explained. “Other times, it was with DC assistance.” We won’t spoil Jimmy’s next date, but know that the character was also done with some DC advice, and they’re even more ridiculous than Giganta—and more trying on Kara. [embed]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PCq12i5r3Ug[/embed] Speaking of her, io9 asked if there were any plans to put Kara in some romantic hijinks of her own outside of Jimmy’s orbit. The pair admitted that yes, the team had episode ideas where she’d go on dates, from Steve Lombard to some supervillains. “Those [villain dates] would’ve ended in swift and violent justice,” said Wyatt, which sounds like a riot. Unfortunately, these ideas were some of many in the season to be cut, so the team opted to give Kara a more serious arc of coming into her own as a hero. That journey, part of which involves her little fangirl Jessica Cruz, will play out as My Adventures With Superman continues with new episodes this summer. But if the show comes back for season four, maybe then we’ll see the Woman of Tomorrow make some bad romantic choices. Want more io9 news? Check out when to expect the latest Marvel, Star Wars, and Star Trek releases, what’s next for the DC Universe on film and TV, and everything you need to know about the future of Doctor Who. #Adventures #Superman #Creators #Talk #KaraJimmy #Super #ShipJimmy Olsen,My Adventures with Superman,Supergirl,Superman](https://gizmodo.com/app/uploads/2025/09/io9-2025-spoiler.png)
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