Co-founder & CEO, AI for predictable drug discovery and development

Job Description

Job Description

Drug discovery is broken. We're building the AI that fixes it; a scalable closed-loop agentic system that does the scientific reasoning and analysis end-to-end, generating traceable and verifiable predictions and decisions.

We're looking for an experienced founder and operator to join our Technical and Product founders. As Co-founder & CEO your job is to take a built, already-used platform from spin-out through a competitive seed round, a Series A and beyond.

The role is full-time, UK-based, spinning out of Deep Science Ventures over the coming months.

Drug discovery is one of the most important problems in the world, and one of the least solved. Biology is complex. The useful data is sparse. The work runs in slow cycles of trial and error. Teams spend years and billions of dollars on development, and most of the time it still fails.

We don't think the fix is more of the same. Brute force hasn't worked, throwing more compute and more data at biology hasn't made it predictable. Making today's process a little faster won't work either, not at any real scale, because it would still be capped by the scale of what human team can hold in their heads. What will work is a different way of doing the science itself: an AI framework that reasons through it end to end, drawing on everything, the literature, data and the wet-lab, built to get the most out of what today's agentic models are great at while guarding hard against where they fail.

The proof-of-concept is done and has been tested on multiple use cases. In a single run it processed an entire disease's single-cell data, ingested hundreds of experimental facts extracted from literature, built a connected map of the biology, and returned drug-target hypotheses. Each of those was marked supported or refuted, and is traceable with provenance to the exact evidence behind it. When the data is this thin, that grounding is what separates an answer you can build on from one you take on faith. The work came out of a collaboration with the Allen Institute , and the first results are submitted to a top-tier journal , pre-print can be found here:

The current system already produces reliably strong results for certain parts of the drug development pipeline, such as target validation, powered by the data modalities we've built in. The plan is to scale that to every modality to reach what the whole field is chasing: reliably predicting what a clinical trial will do before it runs, with a concrete explanation of the biology of why.

Our approach is to prove things with hard, scored benchmarks rather than decks; decontaminated and point-in-time, so nothing leaks. We've built one for freedom-to-operate already, and the one that matters most is clinical-trial prediction and mechanistic explanation, because a trial is the one place biology gives a straight answer. An engine validated on such a benchmark is more than capable of tackling every stage of drug development, and in time, not just predict an outcome but show how to change it.

That's the mission: not to make today's process a bit faster, but to change what's possible.

This is a deeply hands-on role. As Co-founder & CEO you own the commercial and company-building side from day one, working hand-in-hand with the other cofounders, who own the engine and the science. You will:

• Shape strategy and positioning alongside the founding team.
• Lead fundraising : run a competitive seed round and the path to Series A.
• Build the commercial engine : partnerships, pilots and paying customers across pharma and biotech.
• Build the company : hiring, story, board, grant and academic partnerships, and day-to-day operations.

Location: Hybrid, UK-based · Commitment: Full-time from spin-out · Equity: Meaningful co-founder equity, milestone-linked.

Requirements

We're after a rare kind of operator, someone with a real depth in their field. Maybe that depth is in AI, or AI for biology, and you've built innovative systems the field trusts, with a name that opens doors closed to others. Maybe it's in the clinic, and you've carried drug programs from lead optimisation through IND-enabling studies, owning the go/no-go calls as assets moved toward first-in-human. What stays constant is the caliber: you hold your own in a room of scientists and a room of investors, you lead from the front, and you're here to change an industry, not optimise a corner of it.

Essential Values

• Driven to build a category-defining company at the frontier of AI and drug discovery, and to challenge how the industry works today.
• Impact-driven: you take the initiative, make things happen, and think from first principles about what's really needed.
• Clear entrepreneurial spirit: with the ability to thrive in an ambiguous, unstructured, fast-paced and demanding environment.
• Collaborative by nature: able to partner closely with both the product and tech cofounders.

Essential experience (must-have)

• World-class expertise in a related technical field (AI, ML, therapeutics, etc.).
• Either you've personally led a priced round, or your name and track record make one raisable.
• US or UK based (or flexible on moving) and able to go full-time from spin-out.

Preferred experience (nice-to-have)

• Experience in a leading AI lab or AI-drug-discovery company in a genuinely impactful role.
• A strong, transferable investor network in deep-tech, AI, bio or health.
• Have scaled a company from seed to Series A and beyond.
• Commercial and business-development track record: partnerships, pilots, paying customers.
• Experience selling technical or scientific software into pharma, biotech or research institutions.

Benefits

By joining DSV, you'll be joining a team of operators who have founded companies and led the translation of science at some of the most respected universities, charities, funds and government agencies. DSV is a leading deep-tech venture studio with a portfolio of 50+ science-led companies at a total valuation of ~$700m.

• A genuine co-founder equity stake, milestone-linked so that delivering a strong round is richly rewarded.
• Access to proprietary venture-building tools, resources and processes proven to create high-impact companies from scratch.
• Access to DSV's global network of investors, advisors and industrial partners.
• A proven, working platform and a hard technical moat already in place - your job is the market and the money, not the technology.
• Continuous post-spinout support including fundraising, commercial partnerships, recruitment and team-building.

Deep Science Ventures (DSV) is on a mission to create a future in which both humans and the planet can thrive. We use our unique venture creation process to create, spin-out, and invest in science companies, combining available scientific knowledge and founder-type scientists into high-impact ventures. Operating across Pharmaceuticals, Climate, Agriculture, and Computation, we tackle the challenges defining these areas by taking a first-principles approach and partnering with leading institutions.