Today, Yudao Biotech announced the completion of a Series C1 funding round totaling tens of millions of US dollars. The round was co-led by CITIC Capital's top-tier PE arm, Xinchen Capital, and Decheng Capital, with additional participation from Dachen Financial and Zhong Sheng Xichuang Dingqi Fund (funded by Wuxi's municipal state-owned platform, Xichuang Investment). Dianshi Capital served as the long-term exclusive financial advisor.

Specializing in tackling difficult-to-drug targets, Yudao Biotech is one of the industry's leading enterprises in China, being among the earliest to systematically address the development of drugs for these challenging targets using a dual-driven "AI+Physics" technology approach. The company was founded by Zhang Jian, a globally top-tier scientist in the field of AI and allostery, who is also a distinguished professor at Shanghai Jiao Tong University.

On the technology front, the company has built the globally leading protein conformation regulation database, AlloMatrix, and independently developed its own proprietary AI+Physics computing platform, AlloStar™. Leveraging the AlloMatrix database, the company has created the world's first protein conformation change-specific molecular force field, APSF (Allosteric Protein Specific Forcefield), through deep learning models.

In terms of pipeline, the company has now laid out nearly 20 self-developed programs. The most advanced is NTS071 [Dalretapopt], a small-molecule candidate drug that reactivates the p53 Y220C mutant, which has entered an international multicenter Phase I clinical trial and is about to advance to Phase II. Another pipeline targets NRF2 with a covalent allosteric molecular glue, with plans to initiate Phase I trials simultaneously in China and the US in the fourth quarter of this year.

The proceeds from this funding round will primarily be used to accelerate the iteration of the AI+Physics computing platform and advance core pipeline programs.