Company aims to harness the therapeutic potential of proximity-based medicine against multiple diseases, including age-related conditions.
AI-native biotech Proxima has raised $80 million in an oversubscribed seed round to advance new medicines designed to control how proteins interact with one another. Previously known as VantAI, the company has rebranded as Proxima to reflect its focus on “proximity modulation” – a therapeutic strategy designed to influence which proteins come into contact, for how long, and under what conditions.
The New York and Boston-based company says the funding will be used to advance proximity-based therapeutics across multiple disease areas, including conditions tied to aging, where complex, system-level dysfunction has made many targets resistant to conventional approaches.
“The molecular damage that drives aging, from genomic instability to epigenetic drift to mitochondrial dysfunction, ultimately converges on disrupted protein interactions,” Proxima CEO Zachary Carpenter told us. “That convergence is precisely why proximity-based medicines are so compelling for aging: these molecules offer the unique potential to restore lost interactions, eliminate toxic ones, or transiently pulse activate repair programs, opening therapeutic possibilities for age-related diseases that have been intractable to conventional approaches.”
Proxima’s work builds on recent progress in protein science, where AI has largely solved the problem of predicting individual protein structures from sequence. While that achievement marked a turning point for biology, therapeutic design depends not just on knowing what proteins look like in isolation, but on understanding how they assemble into transient, dynamic complexes inside cells.
By intervening at the level of protein interactions, proximity-based medicines aim to restore beneficial connections, dismantle harmful ones, or briefly activate repair pathways that fade over time. Nearly every biological process is governed by protein–protein interactions, yet the overwhelming majority of these interactions remain poorly understood. According to Proxima, fewer than 5 percent have been structurally characterized, leaving most of the human interactome effectively invisible to traditional drug discovery. The company’s strategy is built around mapping this uncharted space at scale and using that knowledge to design medicines that can precisely rewire cellular behavior.
“Proximity-based medicines represent one of the most powerful new ways to treat disease, but progress has been constrained by a lack of structural data and accurate design tools,” said Carpenter. “By combining proteome-scale structural data with frontier AI models, we’re building the foundation needed to make these therapies broadly accessible rather than rare exceptions.”
Proxima’s approach combines a structural proteomics system capable of generating detailed data on protein complexes across the proteome with a foundational AI model designed to operate at atomic resolution across multiple molecular modalities. The company’s ambition is to make biology more programmable, turning protein interactions into something that can be systematically designed rather than discovered by trial and error.
In addition to advancing its own internal pipeline of proximity-modulating therapies, Proxima also works extensively with external partners, and has established major research collaborations with several major pharma companies. The company says that several co-developed programs are now moving towards the clinic, with the first expected to begin clinical trials in 2026.
The financing was led by DCVC with participation from NVIDIA’s venture capital arm and a broad group of strategic and institutional investors.
“Proximity-based therapeutics represent one of most promising frontiers in modern drug discovery with the potential to treat previously intractable diseases and target ‘undruggable’ proteins,” said DCVC’s Jason Pontin.
