Salt AI Raises $10M to Accelerate AI-Powered Drug Discovery

Los Angeles-based Salt AI announced a $10 million funding round on September 22, 2025, led by Morpheus Ventures, with participation from Struck Capital, Marbruck Investments, and CoreWeave. The company will use the capital to expand its customer footprint among leading biopharma and healthcare companies while scaling global AI engineering teams to accelerate delivery and impact.

Salt AI has developed an AI orchestration platform that enables pharmaceutical, biotech, and healthcare organizations to integrate multiple AI models into compliant workflows across drug discovery, clinical development, and enterprise operations. The platform addresses a fundamental challenge facing life sciences organizations: the inability to efficiently combine AI models from different sources into cohesive, transparent workflows that meet regulatory requirements.

The Multi-Model Orchestration Approach

Rather than relying on any single AI model, Salt AI's platform enables ensemble orchestration—combining specialized AI models that work in synergy. Different model architectures excel at different tasks: diffusion models for structure prediction, transformer-based sequence models for amino acid chains, and validation models like AlphaFold2 for protein folding verification. Salt AI's model-agnostic architecture allows organizations to integrate best-of-breed models from any provider and switch between options as new capabilities emerge, avoiding vendor lock-in.

"No single AI model can unlock the future of medicine alone," said Aber Whitcomb, CEO and Co-Founder of Salt AI. "The future belongs to ensembles, models working in synergy. Our platform is designed so organizations can rapidly create, launch, and scale AI solutions that drive healthcare innovation forward."

Bridging Technical & Domain Expertise

Life sciences organizations face a persistent communication gap between domain experts—biochemists, oncologists, clinicians—and technical teams building AI implementations. Existing AI solutions often function as "black boxes," making it difficult for cross-functional teams to collaborate effectively throughout workflows. This communication barrier slows innovation and increases implementation timelines.

Salt AI's visual-first interface maintains full code capabilities, enabling real-time collaboration without sacrificing technical sophistication. Scientists and executives can understand and contribute to AI workflows through drag-and-drop tools, while technical teams retain complete control over implementation details.

The Salt Matrix Platform

At the center of Salt AI's offering is the Salt Matrix, a comprehensive catalog of sector-specific data connectors, models, and solutions that enable teams to rapidly build AI workflows. The platform delivers three core capabilities:

• Visual Collaboration: Cross-functional teams work together in real time, eliminating communication barriers between technical and domain experts
• Rapid Deployment: Private cloud or on-premises environments can be deployed in days
• Compliance Infrastructure: Built-in data governance, audit trails, and regulatory compliance features designed for pharmaceutical and healthcare environments

Customers are deploying Salt AI across multiple use cases including drug discovery workflows, clinical trial optimization, revenue cycle management, enterprise knowledge management, and cross-functional workflow automation.

Leadership & Founding Team

Salt AI was founded in 2023 by Aber Whitcomb and Jim Benedetto, executives with deep expertise in high-performance computing gained from building MySpace's infrastructure. As former CTO of MySpace, Whitcomb brings experience managing massive computational workloads that required significant infrastructure optimization and system reliability.

"We're taking the same performance and scalability mindset that we brought to platforms like MySpace and applying it to drug discovery," said Jim Benedetto, Salt AI's CTO. "This isn't just about building faster models—it's about providing a new level of transparency and iteration speed that redefines what's possible in life sciences."

This HPC foundation has enabled Salt AI to achieve significant performance improvements in computationally intensive tasks like protein structure prediction.

Ellison Medical Institute Partnership

The platform's capabilities have been validated through a partnership with the Ellison Medical Institute (EMI), led by cancer researcher Dr. David Agus. The collaboration began in summer 2024 and was formally announced in March 2025, marking Salt AI's entry as a life sciences-dedicated company.

The partnership has produced measurable outcomes:

• 22x faster AlphaFold2 execution compared to commercially available cloud implementations, enabling rapid protein structure validation
• Design and analysis of thousands of compounds, compressing traditional drug discovery timelines
• Advancement of two protein candidates to wet-lab studies based on positive in vitro results as of August 2025
• Integration of seven different model architectures from multiple institutions, significantly reducing technical implementation time

"Salt AI represents a transformative advance in the computational biology stack," said Dr. David Agus, Founding CEO of the Ellison Medical Institute. "By combining drag-and-drop workflows with transparent AI integration, the platform enables a new paradigm of therapeutic design, one that is faster, more efficient, and highly data-driven."

The AlphaFold2 performance demonstrates how Salt AI's HPC foundation translates into practical gains. The platform uses AlphaFold2 as a validation step after diffusion models predict protein structure and sequence models predict amino acid chains—a multi-model orchestration that exemplifies the ensemble approach.

Investor Backing

CoreWeave's participation in the funding round is particularly notable given its specialized AI cloud platform purpose-built for complex computational models. "Salt AI is the kind of company CoreWeave aims to support, applying AI to one of society's most urgent challenges," said Brian Venturo, Co-Founder and Chief Strategy Officer at CoreWeave. "Our AI cloud platform is purpose-built for complex models, enabling Salt AI to run workloads quickly and reliably and giving life sciences companies a practical way to integrate AI into everyday research."

Future Outlook

Salt AI positions itself as a collaborative operating system for life sciences rather than a point solution for specific tasks. This infrastructure-focused approach enables organizations to build custom workflows tailored to their specific scientific and operational requirements while maintaining compliance and transparency standards.

The platform addresses a critical limitation of many AI implementations: the loss of domain-specific knowledge as data moves through computational pipelines. By maintaining transparency and enabling expert oversight at each workflow step, Salt AI reduces the risk of errors that can propagate through analysis chains.

As foundation models continue to advance and regulatory frameworks for AI in healthcare mature, platforms that enable compliant, transparent integration of multiple AI models are becoming infrastructure requirements for drug discovery organizations. The combination of significant funding, demonstrated performance improvements at the Ellison Medical Institute, and growing enterprise adoption positions Salt AI to define standards for AI-enabled life sciences research.