1Mby1M AI Investor Forum: Angel Investor Raju Reddy (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: You know, we’ve had several discussions on AI-enabled drug discovery in, towards the end of last year. We have covered AI-enabled drug discovery on our blog quite extensively. It’s an area that I think is super exciting and super promising.

Now, the conclusion that was coming out of those discussions was that drug discovery platforms that are out there, like Adam Weiss, for example, are selling only to the large pharmas. So, if you’re a researcher at a university or if you’re trying to do a startup in drug discovery, you don’t really have access to the infrastructure that you need to be able to develop your products.

But I think DeepSeek changes a lot of that assumption. And DeepSeek is going to spawn a lot of infrastructure layer innovation. I think somewhere, the fusion between pure infrastructure layer, as well as domain-specific models combination is also going to create a platform layer that is going to be really interesting in terms of enabling a lot of innovation at those levels as well.

So for example, if you combine a DeepSeek or comparable efficient model, train it in the pharmaceutical industry kind of data, and that’s something that startups use to come up with new drugs based on their areas of expertise, that would be one of the ways to unlock drug discovery as a startup exercise, as opposed to just happening inside of pharmaceuticals.

Raju Reddy: Actually, you bring up a great point. The way I think about that, Sramana is, when we say researcher, we tend to think of somebody who’s got a PhD degree and is sitting in a lab working on it. That may be perhaps five million people in the world or ten million at the most, but there are probably a hundred million people who have that capacity without necessarily a PhD, but more importantly, have that inquisitive mind of wanting to learn and explore specific topics.

That’s really what these tools like SciSpace do. It now allows many more of these inquisitive minds around the world to essentially accomplish what a researcher in a lab might be able to do because of these tools. Several years ago, there was an X PRIZE competition after the Exxon oil spill accident to clean up the oil in the ocean. One of the top three contestants, interestingly, came from a tattoo parlor in Las Vegas. So, they are not scientists, obviously, but they had an inquisitive mind, they had some knowledge of, I guess, how tattoos are glued or placed or whatever.

That’s to me is a real example.

Sramana Mitra: Of where innovation comes from.

Raju Reddy: Eexactly, and these are the tools that make that possible, right?

Sramana Mitra: Yes. So there is an incredibly exciting improvement in tools and infrastructure. There’s a lot of entrepreneurship going on and innovation going on. The DeepSeek moment is especially driving efficiency into the system. That’s number one.

Number two, to me what is really exciting is domain knowledge, right? There’s a lot of domain knowledge in a lot of places. So, if people can have access to infrastructure and don’t need to be in a large company to have access to infrastructure, if they can have access to efficient infrastructure, they can apply their domain knowledge and start entrepreneurial ventures in a very scrappy bootstrapped manner. That is extremely exciting for me.

Raju Reddy: Yes, that’s a great point. A lot of times when entrepreneurs come to me with their pitch saying it has AI, that is okay maybe a year or a year and a half ago. However, today it’s like saying I’m writing computer software, right? AI is such integral part of it.

What really separates you from any other entrepreneur is having that understanding of the domain and the business problem and if and how well you’re solving that, right? So just saying I’m using AI to solve the problem is no longer a meaningful differentiator.

This segment is part 3 in the series : 1Mby1M AI Investor Forum: Angel Investor Raju Reddy
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