It’s been a busy few months for digital chemistry company Chemify. The company aims to bring together chemistry, robotics and computing power to make it faster to design and manufacture new molecules for everything from drug discovery to new catalysts and electronic materials.
In June 2025, Chemify opened its first Chemifarm, an automated chemistry lab for molecular design and synthesis in Glasgow, Scotland, UK, where it has its headquarters.
In October 2025, the company, founded in 2022 as a spin-out from the University of Glasgow, announced that it had raised over $50m in Series B funding - adding to the $43m it raised in 2023. The series B financing will allow it to build a network of its Chemifarms to deliver on-demand molecule design and manufacturing to pharmaceutical, biotech and materials-science companies: the company has plans to open a Silicon Valley facility in the US.
And then, in December 2025, Chemify announced that it had received $1.6m grant funding from the Gates Foundation to continue work on the discovery of small molecules for tuberculosis. That funding builds on an earlier Gates Foundation-funding for design and discover new drug leads for tuberculosis and malaria using digital chemistry. In this next phase, Chemify will work with biotech company Lgenia on the design and optimisation of new molecules; Chemify will then design and synthesise potential hits and leads through its digital chemistry workflow.
At the core of Chemify is its ‘chemputation’ platform, a combination of a chemistry-focused programming language, robotics and a database of reactions. Much chemical synthesis is still performed in a bespoke way with specialised equipment and lots of labour-intensive trial and error. The scientific literature often lacks the details and the nuances that are key, which then makes reproducing another researchers’ route to a molecule much harder than it should be.
Chemify argues that its approach can tackle some of the problems for chemists through a combination of a language that can encode these real-world rules; lab automation that ensures these rules are followed consistently; and its proprietary database of reactions that have been validated and automated. This means the company’s technology can translate the target molecule that it, or its customers, want to create into chemical code that is then understood by its robotic systems, allowing for automated design-make-test-analyse cycles. Chemify argues that this closed-loop approach can avoid synthesis bottlenecks and speed up the path from idea to actual compound. While there are already increasing examples of automation across chemistry and plenty of work being done on self-driving labs, Chemify wants to go further with a system that is much more flexible.
‘The vision for Chemify is very grand, it’s literally to take all of the known chemical reactions and encode them in an executable format,’ says Lee Cronin, Chemify chief executive. ‘Chemify’s plan is the digitisation of chemistry, not the trivialisation of chemistry. Lots of people think that digitisation is trivialisation – no, it’s accurately recording what people are doing, so that we can get better outcomes,’ he tells C&I. Cronin says that this can help fix that gap between what a chemist wants to do and what is actually made. Repeating the process to create a particular molecule can be challenging because a synthesis that works in one lab might fail in another.
‘The meeting I just had was a cross-functional meeting with a chemist and engineer, and software developer, an ontology specialist and we are all working out why is there still a gap in some cases between what a chemist intends and what we actually encode,’ he says. Chemify’s system is an attempt to bring certainty to the process.
‘Chemify is this bridge between artisan chemistry, molecular design and the automation to do more chemistry and get further into the chemical space,’ he adds. ‘In chemistry, I think there’s a broad consensus that all the literature could be encoded so that it worked and that would be a great [benefit] to chemistry,’ he notes. ‘Chemify is kind of a chemical space exploration project: it takes all the reactions known to humanity and does them for real and gets the data, checks the program and makes sure that it’s reproducible so we have this vast database of reactions that we have measured and reactions we can do with the building blocks.’
Another problem the company hopes to address is one created by the recent rise of artificial intelligence (AI) in chemistry, which among other things, has made it much easier to generate lots of plausible target molecules. Chemify says that its ‘quantum chemputation’ system helps to rule out molecules that look good on a computer screen but cannot actually be created in the real world.
‘Quantum chemputation is the answer to AI hallucination,’ Cronin says. ‘The unification of the chemistry, the artisanal chemistry, the molecular design and the software allows us to say “what is makeable?” ‘We’ve got technology for making molecules, we unify engineering chemistry, chem-informatics and retrosynthesis and then with quantum chemputation we can design molecules that we know we can make in the Chemifarm.’
But what about the role of the chemist in future, if so much of what they do is automated? ‘What we are doing is accelerating the fun bit by making sure that the laborious and unsafe bit is done automatically. The chemist still gets to think and explore and do chemistry and do experiments by hand that have never been done before,’ Cronin emphasises. ‘There’s always going to be need for human investigation.’
Cronin says Chemify’s initial target market is pharmaceutical R&D and says that the company is working with eight out of the top 20 pharma companies, but there are also opportunities in areas such as fragrances, catalysts and pigments.
‘The system works – I can draw molecules into the software and press submit and the molecule gets made and that’s pretty cool. Those molecules are increasing in complexity, and we can make them on the milligram to gram scale,’ he emphasises. Cronin says the company has worked on a number of drug discovery projects which have resulted in interesting new molecules. ‘The next proof point is to accelerate to make more of those molecules, to scale up that so that’s what we are doing right now, so we can address more,’ he says. ‘The proof point is that people can see the technology is resulting in real molecules and real IP.’
Among the future projects the company has planned is to continue to scale safely and get as much chemistry encoded as possible and that is something that is ‘non-trivial’, Cronin says. The company is looking at building further Chemifarm labs and a chemical data farm to store its growing knowledge.
‘What a chemical data farm does is we do all the reactions and put the data in the database and map chemical space, all the possible chemical reactions, almost like the human genome project for chemistry. And the more of that we do, the more value we get for our customers because the faster we can go - it’s a bit like an underpinning layer,’ says Cronin.
Further reading on digital chemistry
- AI in pharma: Helping science to find drugs faster
- Critical minerals: Harnessing AI to improve discovery and supply
- Turning agrifood waste into sustainable protein with fermentation
For over 100 years Chemistry & Industry (C&I) magazine has reported on the scientific advances being harnessed to tackle society's biggest challenges. C&I covers advances in agrifood, energy, health and wellbeing, materials, sustainability and environment, as well as science careers, policy and broader innovation issues. C&I’s readers are scientific researchers, business leaders, policy makers and entrepreneurs who harness science to spark innovation.
Get the latest science and innovation news every month with a subscription to Chemistry & Industry magazine. You can subscribe to C&I here.
Visit Blog