Anthropic is now a biotech company. At least of sorts.
The San Francisco–based frontier AI lab has acquired Coefficient Bio, a stealth New York-based biotech AI startup, in a stock deal valued at just over $400 million, according to reporting from Newcomer and The Information. The deal brings a team of fewer than 10 people, most of them former Genentech computational biology researchers, into Anthropic’s healthcare and life sciences division. Against Anthropic’s $380 billion post-money valuation, set in its February Series G, the acquisition represents roughly 0.1% dilution. Little was known about the company before the acquisition. Its overview on Linkedin is: “Building for the future.”
Anthropic’s life science ambitions continue to expand
The acquisition marks an escalation in Anthropic’s life sciences strategy. Until now, the company’s approach has largely centered on adapting its general-purpose Claude models for scientific workflows through connectors, integrations and enterprise partnerships. The company announced Claude for Life Sciences last October. With Coefficient Bio, Anthropic is absorbing a team that was building biology-specific AI models from the ground up, with ambitions the startup described as nothing less than “artificial superintelligence for science.”
A deep bench of expertise at a small startup
Coefficient Bio was formally founded roughly eight months ago. Its co-founders, Samuel Stanton and Nathan C. Frey, both came from Prescient Design, Genentech’s computational drug discovery unit.
Stanton, who holds a PhD in data science from NYU, spent time as an ML scientist at Prescient Design, where he worked on experimental design for scientific discovery and contributed to projects including Cortex (a modular deep learning architecture for drug discovery) and Beignet (an open-source standard library for biological research).
Coefficient Bio is part of a broader exodus of Genentech computational biology talent into AI-native startups. Genentech cut at least 489 roles in 2025 as Roche reoriented toward roles that “embed digital, automation and AI capabilities across the organization.” Prescient Design researcher Kyunghyun Cho departed in January 2026. Xaira Therapeutics, which launched in April 2024 with $1 billion in funding, is led by former Genentech Chief Scientific Officer Marc Tessier-Lavigne. Xaira’s executive team also includes Arvind Rajpal, who ran large molecule drug discovery at Genentech, the same unit where Frey served on the leadership team. Where Xaira absorbed senior Genentech executives and David Baker’s protein design models from the University of Washington, Coefficient Bio drew from the ML research ranks at Prescient Design.
Frey’s credentials, too, are impressive. At Prescient Design, he led a multidisciplinary team of ML scientists, engineers, molecular biologists, and computational biologists working on biological foundation models and novel approaches to biomolecule design. He sat on Roche and Genentech’s Foundation Model and Large Molecule Drug Discovery Leadership Teams, where he set research direction, product roadmaps, and long-term AI strategy. He also established and led Prescient’s collaboration with NVIDIA. His publication record includes more than 20 papers in journals such as Science Advances, Nature Machine Intelligence and ACS Nano, along with conference publications at NeurIPS, ICML and ICLR. He won an ICLR Outstanding Paper Award in 2024 for “Protein Discovery with Discrete Walk-Jump Sampling,” a generative modeling approach designed for discovering actual drug candidates, holds a PhD in materials science and engineering from the University of Pennsylvania (where he was a National Defense Science and Engineering Graduate Fellow), and was recently named a 2026 Termeer Fellow, a selective biotech leadership program.
‘Ushering biopharma into the Intelligence Age’
In January, Stanton posted a recruiting pitch on X: “We’re ushering biopharma into the Intelligence Age. It will change everything about how the industry learns and makes decisions,” as Newcomer reported.
According to The Information, Coefficient Bio had built a platform that enabled AI to carry out biotech tasks including drafting drug R&D plans, managing clinical regulatory strategies, and discovering new drug candidates.
The team will join Anthropic’s Health Care Life Sciences group, led by Eric Kauderer-Abrams, who was hired in mid-2025 after running a diagnostics company focused on nucleic acid detection.
At a healthcare event at the JP Morgan Healthcare Conference, Kauderer-Abrams laid out a three-part life sciences roadmap: making Claude “hands down the best model for everything in biology.”
Anthropic’s previous acquisitions include Bun, a JavaScript runtime, and Vercept, an AI agent computer-use startup.
