China's LigIT has closed a seed financing of nearly RMB 50 million (USD 7.5 million) from Xunfei Capital, Lighthouse Founders' Fund and a recognised industry investor, launching a company built around generative AI for peptide drug discovery. The company boasts a virtual-screening platform that increases screening speed by roughly a million-fold and enables genome-scale target coverage, applying it to peptides, a modality enjoying renewed industry interest due to cyclic peptides' ability to engage shallow pockets and traditionally undruggable targets that small molecules and antibodies often miss.

LigIT's moat is meant to solve the field's chronic bottlenecks: scarce public peptide structures, models that do not scale and native peptides with poor in vivo stability. LigIT has assembled a three-layer stack of proprietary large-scale closed-source peptide synthesis data, a scaling-law-driven peptide generation model and mirror-peptide generation elements, wrapped in a 72-hour generate-synthesise-test-resolve loop covering linear and cyclic peptides, chemistry, biological assays and structural characterisation.

The seed proceeds will fund pipeline advancement, computing infrastructure and patent filings.