The first time a top-10 drugmaker called AI scientist company FutureHouse, offering $30 million to use the nonprofit’s artificial intelligence agents for drug discovery, CEO Sam Rodriques thought there was a misunderstanding; the offer couldn’t be real, he said.
Then it happened again. The head of AI at another big pharma company came knocking. “‘We could just build our own [AI] agents on top of OpenAI or Anthropic, but you guys are the Ferrari of agents. … What would the point be?’” Rodriques, who formerly ran the Applied Biotechnology Lab at the Francis Crick Institute, recalled the executive saying.
Rodriques and his co-founder Andrew White, a former chemical engineering professor at the University of Rochester, founded FutureHouse in 2023. The goal: scale scientific discovery by giving every scientist AI agents that could reason on their own. But when pharma came calling, they realized there was a demand for a commercial product. So they spun off Edison Scientific as its own company in late 2025, with $70 million in venture funding.
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