Terray Therapeutics

Terray Therapeutics is a biotechnology company that combines ultra-high throughput experimentation, generative AI, biology, medicinal chemistry, automation, and nanotechnology to explore molecules and their targets for the purpose of discovering and developing small-molecule therapeutics. The Los Angeles, CA-based company was founded in 2018. Terray Therapeutics was founded by brothers Jacob Berlin and Eli Berlin. Jacob Berlin is CEO. Eli Berlin, who has a finance background, is CFO and COO.

Terray's methods are based on Dr. Jacob Berlin’s research. He previously studied chemistry at Harvard and Caltech and worked as a postdoc at MIT on the design and development of molecules. Berlin worked on a second postdoc at Rice University, where he performed research on nanomaterials and ultra-miniaturization. He then became a professor at the National Cancer Center, City of Hope, where his research combined nanomaterial and synthetic chemistry.

Narbe Mardirossian, Head of Computational and Data Sciences, has a background in machine learning and quantum mechanics and quantum chemistry. Mardirossian previously worked at Amgen in therapeutics discovery and small molecule discovery, working on physics-based models and machine learning models. Eli Berlin’s background was all in finance, where he had ten years of private equity and investment banking.

According to Terray, billions of biochemical interactions are measured daily and become increasingly precise with each cycle of design and experimentation. Terray’s ultra-dense microarray technology is used to create chemical datasets in which biochemical interactions between small molecules and disease causes are systematically mapped using Terray’s integrated machine learning and computational platform.

Series A funding of $60 million was led by Madrona in 2022. Other investors include Two Sigma Ventures, Digitalis Ventures, KdT Ventures, Goldcrest Capital, XTX Ventures, Sahsen Ventures, Greentrail Capital, and the folks at Alexandria.

Terray received investment from NVIDIA’s venture capital arm, NVentures, in October 2023 and announced it would leverage NVIDIA DGX Cloud to develop the world’s most comprehensive chemistry foundation models for small molecules. The company stated it planned for some of these models on NVIDIA BioNeMo cloud service for generative AI in drug discovery. Terray stated plans to make use of NVIDIA AI software stack and NVIDIA full-stack computing expertise to create ligand-based and structure-based models to move its pipeline toward the clinic.