The next time someone tells you drug discovery is slow, expensive, and chained to legacy chemistry, you point them to Menlo Park, where Synfini Inc. is putting that narrative through the shredder.
Spun out of SRI International less than a year ago, Synfini just closed an $8.9M expansion round. Lead investor JSL Health Capital showed up with the conviction, and a deep syndicate followed, including WERU Investments, Ferocity Capital, SRI Ventures, Foothill Ventures, Trust Ventures, High Water Venture Partners, Mana Ventures, and Gaingels. That’s not a cap table, that’s a tactical unit, the kind you deploy when you’re done playing with whiteboards and ready to push molecules from idea to impact.
Synfini isn’t another “AI-for-drugs” PowerPoint special. This is neuro-symbolic AI fused with real-world chemical automation, a platform born from a DARPA-backed project inside SRI and seven years of hard science. The workhorses under the hood? SynRoute for AI-driven synthesis planning, AutoSyn for multi-step flow chemistry, SynJet for reaction optimization, and DASL, the Deep Adaptive Semantic Logic engine, for compound design so precise, it might make your med chem lead tear up a little.
Doug Donzelli isn’t new to the rodeo. With four decades across software, medical devices, and industrial chemistry, he’s seen enough buzzwords to know they don’t pay the lab bills. Backing him is Elizabeth Miyagi, Synfini’s Co-founder and VP of Finance, with three decades of startup finance muscle. Then there’s Peter Madrid, Ph.D., and Nathan Collins, Ph.D., scientific minds from SRI who helped build this technology and now drive its evolution from the inside. This is what happens when the right team doesn’t just license IP, they own the know-how.
And the market’s already listening. Strategic collabs with Sanofi, Janssen Pharmaceutica NV, Multispan, and O2nix Bio are proof that Synfini’s platform isn’t a moonshot, it’s a magnet. For drug hunters in academia, biotech, and big pharma, this is the toolkit that makes DMTA cycles faster, smarter, and less painful. Think fewer dead ends, more viable leads, and maybe, just maybe, a few drug candidates you actually want to bet on.
The $53M raised to date, across grants and venture, is fueling a future that’s already underway: scalable, automated, intelligent molecular design built for speed and precision. Synfini isn’t trying to disrupt chemistry, it’s re-engineering the tempo.
