AI Startup Radar: $2.1B for Drug Discovery, Martha Stewart Enters AI, and a Former xAI Founder's Next Move

Three healthcare-adjacent AI deals dominated the week's funding headlines, all landing on May 12 within hours of each other. Isomorphic Labs closed a $2.1 billion round — the largest AI drug discovery raise on record. Exaforce and Forus each crossed major valuation thresholds in security and healthcare operations. Meanwhile, two new entrants worth tracking: Martha Stewart entered the AI arena with a home-management platform, and xAI co-founder Igor Babuschkin is reportedly raising $1 billion for a new research lab.

Demis Hassabis's drug discovery spinout from Google DeepMind raised $2.1 billion in a Series B led by Thrive Capital 1. The round includes Alphabet, GV, MGX, Temasek, CapitalG, and the UK Sovereign AI Fund — a capital base that now spans Silicon Valley, the Middle East, Singapore, and the British government.

Hassabis founded Isomorphic in 2021 to apply AI to drug design from first principles. The company's engine, IsoDDE, models molecular interactions computationally rather than screening physical compound libraries. The goal is to compress the preclinical timeline from years to months. Isomorphic now says it will enter its first human clinical trials by the end of 2026 — a delay from Hassabis's earlier timeline but still aggressive by pharma standards 1.

The round's composition is worth noting. Thrive Capital, traditionally a later-stage software investor, led the round. MGX and the UK Sovereign AI Fund represent sovereign capital flowing into applied AI. For founders watching the space, the message is clear: AI drug discovery has graduated from research project to institutional asset class.

Exaforce builds AI agents called "Exabots" that automate security operations — detecting threats, triaging alerts, and responding in real time. The company says its platform cuts manual analyst work by up to 90% 2.

The round was led by HarbourVest and Peak XV, with participation from Mayfield, Khosla Ventures, and Seligman Ventures. Total funding now stands at $200 million across two rounds in 12 months.

Founder and CEO Ankur Singla has a track record that investors are betting on directly. He previously founded Volterra, an application delivery platform that sold to F5 for $500 million in 2021. Singla then ran F5's security products group before leaving in 2022 to start Exaforce in 2023 3.

Exaforce has 20 paying customers, including Replit and Guardant Health, and expects to reach 40 to 50 by year-end. Singla told TechCrunch that the surge in AI-powered attacks has shifted customer conversations from "Why do I need this?" to "How do I operationalize it?" 2.

Competitors include 7AI, Dropzone AI, and Prophet Security, plus the incumbents Palo Alto Networks and CrowdStrike. The crowded field means Exaforce's $725 million valuation is a bet on Singla's execution speed and the "agentic SOC" framing winning over buyers.

Forus, formerly known as Tandem, emerged from stealth with a $1 billion valuation and $160 million in total funding from Thrive Capital, General Catalyst, and Accel 4.

The company solves a problem that is genuinely massive and genuinely boring: when a doctor writes a prescription, the administrative backend — insurance prior authorization, pharmacy stock checks, patient assistance program navigation, formulary matching — often takes days or weeks to resolve. Billions of prescriptions go unfilled each year because of this friction, not because the drugs don't work.

Founder Sahir Jaggi is 31. His parents immigrated from India; his grandfather ran a capacitor manufacturing business. Jaggi studied biomedical engineering at Columbia, spent five years as a product lead at health insurer Oscar, and was named to Forbes 30 Under 30 in Healthcare in 2025 4.

Forus does not charge doctors or patients. Its revenue comes from pharmaceutical companies that pay to help new drugs reach people who need them. Half of the world's top 10 pharma companies are already partners. Revenue has grown roughly 10x annually for two years, and current ARR exceeds $50 million — about 4x what it was at the start of the year 4.

Martha Stewart launched Hint, an AI-native home management platform that pulls public property data and user-uploaded documents (inspection reports, insurance policies) to track maintenance schedules, flag issues, and recommend services 5.

The $10 million seed was led by Slow Ventures, with Montauk Capital, Tusk Venture Partners, Amplo, and Energy Impact Partners participating 6. The founding team pairs Stewart with Yih-Han Ma, a home-services executive who serves as CEO, and Kyle Rush, an AI engineer and Stewart's neighbor who serves as CTO. Stewart herself wrote the guidelines the model follows and tested its suggestions on her own properties.

The business model is affiliate commissions from recommended products and services. Competitors like Honey Homes and Birdwatch rely on human labor for home management. Hint's bet is that AI can do the same work at near-zero marginal cost. The company plans to launch this summer.

Hint is a reminder that application-layer AI does not need to look like enterprise SaaS or deep tech. A 40-year domain expert channeling their knowledge into an AI product, paired with a technical co-founder who can build it, is a repeatable formula that will produce more companies like this.

Igor Babuschkin, who co-founded xAI with Elon Musk, is in advanced talks to raise up to $1 billion for a new AI research startup called River AI, according to Forbes 7. The target valuation is around $5 billion.

River AI is still in formation — no product, no announced team beyond Babuschkin, no confirmed investors. But the sheer scale of the raise, for a company that does not yet exist, tells you something about how capital allocators are pricing AI talent. A founder who helped build a major lab can command a unicorn valuation before writing a line of code.

Three patterns from this week's activity:

Healthcare dominates application-layer AI funding. Isomorphic, Forus, and (narrowly out-of-window) PathAI's $1 billion Roche acquisition all sit at the intersection of AI and medicine. The common thread is not AI replacing doctors but AI handling the parts of medicine — drug design, prescription logistics, pathology analysis — that are data-dense and currently bottlenecked by human bandwidth.

Thrive Capital is everywhere. Thrive led Isomorphic's round, was one of three lead investors in Forus, and has been building an AI portfolio that now spans drug discovery, healthcare ops, and (via other bets) infrastructure. For founders, Thrive's pattern is worth studying: they are writing large checks into applied AI where the market need is unambiguous and the technical moat is deep.

Second-time founders are raising at speed. Ankur Singla (Volterra → Exaforce) and Igor Babuschkin (xAI → River AI) both secured nine-figure commitments quickly. Sahir Jaggi's Forus raised $160 million before publicly launching. Investors are betting on founder résumés as much as on product-market fit — a dynamic that early-stage founders should factor into their own fundraising timing and narrative.