Pathos AI has raised $237 million in a Series E round led by Bristol Myers Squibb, a deal that values the New York-based AI drug developer at roughly $3 billion. The financing, announced Friday, arrives with two multi-year collaborations, one with Bristol Myers Squibb and one with Tempus AI, that push Pathos beyond cancer and into Alzheimer's disease and other neurological conditions.
The round landed below the $300 million Pathos had been seeking, but at the post-money valuation the company had targeted. As lead investor, Bristol Myers Squibb also gets non-exclusive strategic access to Pathos Foundry, the company's AI platform, across its broader portfolio, plus three-year exclusive rights to use it in support of its neuroscience development programs.
Foundry is the center of the Pathos pitch. The platform runs thousands of specialized AI agents that estimate the probability of success for the company's clinical assets, working through clinical data, genomics, biological specimen data and the activity of competing drug developers. Pathos uses that analysis to decide which drugs to pursue, which patient populations to test them in and how to design the trials.
“Intelligence alone does not bring a therapy to market.”— Iker Huerga, CEO of Pathos AI
Key facts
- 01Pathos AI raised a $237M Series E led by Bristol Myers Squibb at a valuation of roughly $3B.
- 02The round came in below the $300M Pathos had sought, but at the post-money valuation it targeted.
- 03Tempus AI will license Pathos a neurological patient dataset under a five-year, $55M agreement.
- 04Bristol Myers Squibb gets three-year exclusive rights to use Pathos Foundry for its neuroscience programs.
- 05Foundry runs thousands of AI agents that estimate the probability of success for clinical drug candidates.
The data for the new push comes from Tempus AI. Tempus will build a de-identified, longitudinal dataset drawn from hundreds of thousands of patients with neurological conditions, and Pathos will license it under a five-year, $55 million agreement.
Pathos said it will run Foundry over that dataset to generate and test hypotheses about disease biology and to inform more targeted, adaptive clinical trials. The collaborations begin with Alzheimer's disease before extending to other neurological conditions.
The deal marks a clear widening of scope for Pathos, whose clinical pipeline to date sits in oncology. The company lists five clinical-stage programs covering prostate cancer, multiple myeloma, MET-altered non-small cell lung cancer, ER-positive/HER2-negative breast cancer and TROP2/HER3 solid tumors. For Bristol Myers Squibb, the arrangement pairs an equity position with direct use of the platform, and Simon Davies, its senior vice president and head of data and quantitative sciences, framed the partnership around data quality and scientific oversight.
“AI has the greatest potential when it is grounded in high-quality data and applied by scientists”— Simon Davies, SVP, Head of Data and Quantitative Sciences, Bristol Myers Squibb
Tempus, which is publicly traded on Nasdaq, takes the data-supplier role. Founder and CEO Eric Lefkofsky pointed to the scale of patient data and computing that Alzheimer's research demands.
“Making meaningful progress against a disease as devastating as Alzheimer's requires unprecedented data scale and computing”— Eric Lefkofsky, Founder and CEO of Tempus
Pathos AI CEO Iker Huerga cast the collaborations as a recognition that neurological disease requires more than any single company can bring on its own, pairing Pathos's agents with a pharmaceutical partner's development programs and a dedicated data provider.
The terms set two clocks on the Alzheimer's work: Pathos will license the Tempus data for five years at $55 million, and Bristol Myers Squibb's exclusive window on Foundry for its neuroscience programs runs three years.
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