Drug discovery · Peptide macrocycles

Menten AI

A San Francisco company that began by putting protein design on a quantum annealer and now sells generative AI design of cyclic peptides. It has a completed Bristol Myers Squibb collaboration on its own account, no clinical program on any public record, and no SEC filing found.

A founder who would not claim the headline

In June 2020, when Menten AI announced its first money, its chief executive gave a TechCrunch reporter an answer most quantum startups avoid. “We’re not claiming a quantum advantage, but we’re not claiming a quantum disadvantage,” Hans Melo said. Then he went further: “We haven’t proven an advantage.”

That candor sets the terms for reading everything since. Menten AI has said for years that it built the first protein design algorithm for near-term quantum computers. The record supports that the work exists and was published as a preprint. It does not show a quantum speedup, and the company’s current pitch leans on generative AI and physics-based modeling instead.

The problem

Most drug targets resist both small molecules and antibodies. Menten AI’s answer is the peptide, a short chain of amino acids that is bigger than a small molecule and smaller than a biologic. “As a drug modality [peptides] are quite new,” Melo told TechCrunch. Peptides can slip into cells and bind large surfaces, but designing them by computer was hard until recently.

The search space is the obstacle. Designing a peptide means choosing from an astronomical number of sequences and shapes, a combinatorial problem that grows explosively with size. That is the reason a quantum annealer looked attractive: it is built to search such spaces. The reason for caution is that classical methods have kept improving.

Founders

Three people appear as founders in company-adjacent and investor profiles. Hans Melo is CEO and holds a PhD in machine learning and computational neuroscience, according to an AWS startups profile. Tamas Gorbe is COO, with a PhD in biocatalysis, protein engineering and medicinal chemistry, per the same profile. Vikram Mulligan is CTO. He came out of David Baker’s lab at the University of Washington and was a research scientist at the Flatiron Institute in New York, where he designed peptides from non-natural amino acids.

Uncork Capital’s Jeff Clavier explained the bet in 2020: “There’s Hans… the CEO who is more on the quantum side; there’s Tamas [Gorbe] on the bio side and there’s Vikram [Mulligan] who developed the research.” Mulligan’s papers carry a disclosed conflict: in the 2021 XENet paper he and Melo are listed as co-founders and shareholders of Menten AI.

From preprint to platform

In 2019 the team posted a bioRxiv preprint, “Designing Peptides on a Quantum Computer.” It describes QPacker, a system that connects the Rosetta design suite to a D-Wave quantum annealer. The abstract says the approach produced designs “comparable to those produced by widely adopted classical design approaches.” The preprint itself states that it had not been peer reviewed. No peer-reviewed version turned up in searches for this profile.

Menten AI entered Y Combinator for the Winter 2020 batch and raised its seed that June. In January 2022 it announced a partnership with Xanadu to build on the open-source PennyLane library. The same release said the company had received USD 6 million in seed investment, two million dollars above what the press reported in 2020.

The bigger change came later. In May 2024 a Business Wire release announced the completion of a previously undisclosed research collaboration and licensing agreement with Bristol Myers Squibb. By 2025 the company described itself around MAUD 1.0, a platform it says combines generative AI, physics-based models and quantum chemistry simulations to design macrocycles from scratch. A January 2026 post on its own site announced MAUD 1.0 as a launch.

What is proven, and what is still claimed

Read plainly: Menten AI has real scientific pedigree and a documented pharma collaboration on its own account. The performance numbers for its current platform have not been shown publicly, and the quantum claim that made its name has not been peer reviewed or shown to beat classical methods.

What to watch

• Data behind the MAUD 1.0 claims, in a paper, a preprint or a partner statement.
• Whether Bristol Myers Squibb or another pharma company confirms a collaboration.
• A named clinical candidate. None appears on any register searched.
• A new financing. No round since 2020 is documented, and no Form D was found.

In their words

Related companies

• Diffuse Bio: Also in Drug Discovery and Delivery. A Y Combinator company founded by one of the researchers who first pointed diffusion models at proteins
• Nabla Bio: Also in Drug Discovery and Delivery. A Cambridge company that writes antibodies on a computer and tests them in its own lab, aimed at the cell surface proteins conventional discovery keeps missing
• Adaptyv Bio: Also in Drug Discovery and Delivery. A Swiss automated laboratory that turns AI designed protein sequences into measured binding data, and that has published the full results of three open design
• Macromoltek: Also in Drug Discovery and Delivery. An Austin software company that has designed antibodies inside a computer since 2011, paid for by federal grants and customer fees rather than venture rounds

Sources

1. Public recordDesigning Peptides on a Quantum Computer, preprintbioRxiv · 2019
2. Public recordXENet: Using a new graph convolution to accelerate the timeline for protein design on quantum computersPLOS Computational Biology, PubMed 34570773 · Sep 2021
3. Public recordDesigning new peptide and protein therapeutics using adiabatic quantum annealersAPS March Meeting · Mar 2022
4. Public recordRecords search: FDA, ClinicalTrials.gov, NIH, SEC Form DCompiled Sep 2026
5. IndependentMenten AI’s combination of buzzword bingo brings AI and quantum computing to drug discoveryTechCrunch, Jonathan Shieber · Jun 30, 2020
6. IndependentMenten AI Announces $4 Million Seed InvestmentInside Quantum Technology · Jun 30, 2020
7. IndependentMenten AI Raises $4 Million Seed RoundBrownstone Research · Jul 16, 2020
8. IndependentY Combinator Winter 2020 Demo Day company notesTechCrunch, as reposted by Menten AI · Apr 13, 2020
9. IndependentMenten AI Leverages AWS, AI, and Quantum Computing to Create New and Improved DrugsAWS Startups
10. IndependentBargain proteinsArgonne Leadership Computing Facility · May 17, 2022
11. IndependentUsing ALCF supercomputers to design peptide-based drugs with quantum mechanicsArgonne Leadership Computing Facility · Apr 27, 2023
12. IndependentMenten AI company profileCrunchbase · 2024
13. IndependentMenten company profileTracxn
14. IndependentMenten AI revenue estimateGetLatka · 2026
15. CompanyMenten AI partners with Xanadu to develop quantum machine learningPR Newswire · Jan 25, 2022
16. CompanyMenten AI Announces Completion of Research Collaboration with Bristol Myers SquibbBusiness Wire · May 28, 2024
17. CompanyMenten AI website: home, about, technology, publications and news pagesAccessed Sep 29, 2026
18. CompanyMenten AI profileY Combinator · Sep 2026