Chemify secures £22m grant from Scottish Enterprise and UK Government
This article covers Chemify, a Glasgow biotech startup securing £22m in grant funding to expand its automated chemistry facilities and scale its world-model-guided discovery platform Chemify Genesis, alongside an extension of its Series B to £51.9m. The funding aims to build a next-generation Chemifarm, grow the Scottish workforce and enable partners in pharmaceuticals, speciality chemicals and advanced materials to run higher-throughput, automated discovery programmes.
Chemify, a Glasgow biotech startup, has secured £22m in a grant funding round to expand its automated chemistry facilities and scale a new world-model-guided discovery platform called Chemify Genesis. The cash comes alongside an extension to the company’s Series B that takes that round to £51.9m and brings total capital raised to around £110m, backing an ambitious build-out of a next-generation Chemifarm and a significant headcount increase in Scotland.
Why it matters
The investment underlines a rare example of substantial public-sector funding aimed directly at automating and digitising chemical and materials discovery. Chemify’s work sits at the intersection of AI, robotics and chemistry, and the company says the new capacity will let partners in pharmaceuticals, speciality chemicals and advanced materials run closed-loop discovery programmes at higher throughput. For a sector where moving from modelled molecules to physical compounds is often slow and costly, greater lab automation and reproducible digital recipes could shorten development cycles and generate proprietary datasets that inform future design.
Inside the product
Chemify’s proposition centres on two technical pieces. Chemputation is the company’s framework for translating chemical synthesis into executable code that runs on robotic systems. Chemify Genesis is described as a world-model engine that integrates those digital synthesis capabilities with AI to produce a continuously evolving map of molecules, reactions and experimental outcomes, including failed or partial results.
In practice, Genesis aims to convert a target molecule into a machine-readable protocol that can be executed in one of Chemify’s automated facilities, a Chemifarm. The first Chemifarm in Maryhill, Glasgow, has reportedly operated continuously since launch, and the next-generation facility—due online later this year—adds more automated systems, faster workflows and additional synthesis capabilities. Chemify says the platform offers partners secure remote access to run programmes without exposing intellectual property.
The technology is targeted at small-molecule medicines and advanced materials discovery. The company also emphasises its ability to build bespoke molecular models and datasets for partners, a capability that could be valuable for organisations seeking both speed and repeatability in discovery work.
Who are the investors?
The £22m grant package comprises £16m from Scottish Enterprise and £6m from the UK Government. Separately, Chemify’s previously announced Series B has been extended to £51.9m, taking total funding secured to roughly £110m.
Scottish Enterprise has supported Chemify since 2023 and the new funding is directed at a second-generation Chemifarm build, scaling the company’s Scottish workforce from about 152 employees to roughly 450 over the next three years, with Chemify projecting up to 300 new roles and safeguarding about 100 existing positions.
In the announcement, Adrian Gillespie, Chief Executive at Scottish Enterprise, said:
Chemify’s investment is a powerful vote of confidence in Scotland as a place to scale innovative deep-tech businesses. It will accelerate the company’s growth and create exciting opportunities across chemistry, advanced manufacturing and life sciences sectors. Having supported Chemify since 2023, I’m excited to see Lee and his team continue to choose Scotland for their expansion. It underlines the strength of Scotland’s innovation environment and the calibre of companies growing here. By backing ambitious, scaling businesses like Chemify, we’re helping world-leading Scottish science make a bigger impact globally.
In the announcement, Chris McDonald, UK Science Minister, said:
Chemify is changing the way that drugs are discovered by using artificial intelligence and robotics. They are doing this right here in Britain, which gives us the best opportunity to access new treatments earlier and make and sell drugs for the rest of the world. The decisions we have taken in our industrial strategy are helping companies like Chemify to start here in the UK, grow here and stay here. It is a big change from the past when many of our world leading science discoveries were commercialised overseas. We are aiming to have the third biggest life sciences industry in the world, and the biggest in Europe by 2035. It's is one of the ways that we will help people across the country to get decent well paid jobs.
In the announcement, Stephen Flynn, Cabinet Secretary for Economy, Tourism and Transport, said:
Scotland is a global centre for life sciences innovation and advanced manufacturing. This significant investment and creation of up to 300 highly skilled jobs at Chemify in Glasgow is a major boost for our economy and will help grow one of Scotland's most important and dynamic sectors. By supporting pioneering companies such as Chemify, we are reinforcing Scotland's position at the forefront of scientific discovery and next generation technologies, while helping deliver the ambitions set out in our Life Sciences Strategy, including growing the sector's contribution to £25 billion by 2035.
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Founder perspective
In the announcement, Lee Cronin, CEO and Founder at Chemify, said:
The additional funding will enable us to hyperscale chemistry, expand our next-generation Chemifarm and advance our Chemify Genesis system to vastly increase our capacity to create new molecules, materials and medicines and bespoke datasets.
Cronin founded the company as a University of Glasgow spinout. The team has pitched Chemify as a way to make discovery cycles more data rich and reproducible by logging not only successful reactions but also failures and partial outcomes, which feed back into the world model.
The bigger picture
Chemify’s expansion illustrates how public funding is being used to de-risk deep-tech infrastructure that combines robotics and AI. Automated, digitised discovery platforms could shift where value accrues in the drug and materials supply chain by concentrating early design and data-generation capabilities in a small number of high-throughput facilities. That raises questions about access, IP models and how academic and commercial partners share the resulting datasets.
If Chemify’s model works at scale, it could accelerate development timelines for molecular candidates and attract partnerships from pharma and advanced materials firms. The company’s stated plans to build further Chemifarms internationally, including in the United States, will test how portable its approach is across regulatory regimes and lab ecosystems.
This funding round is part of a broader push across the UK and Europe to retain commercialisation activity at home and to build industrial-scale capabilities in life sciences and advanced manufacturing. Chemify’s expansion into larger automated facilities and the creation of hundreds of jobs in Glasgow will be watched by policymakers and investors as a test case for public-private collaboration in deep-tech biotech.
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