Seattle startup Rhizome Research is building AI systems to design made-to-order small drug-like molecules for drug discovery.
Founded by former Amazon AI engineer Xhuliano Brace, the company was launched with a six-figure personal investment and now employs five people. Rhizome has built a proprietary graph neural network model trained on more than 800 million molecules to support fragment-based drug discovery, and recently released ADAMS, an open-source AI tool for simulating molecular binding while planning additional physics-based simulation tools and partnerships with wet labs for validation. “I really want to make Seattle kind of a hub for small molecule drug discovery,” Brace said.
Together, these advancements reinforce Seattle’s role as a leading center for AI-enabled drug discovery.