Insilico Medicine, a clinical-stage AI-driven drug discovery company headquartered in Hong Kong, and Liquid AI, a Cambridge, Massachusetts-based AI foundation model company spun out of MIT, announced a strategic partnership to co-develop lightweight scientific foundation models for pharmaceutical research. The collaboration has produced LFM2-2.6B-MMAI (v0.2.1), a 2.6 billion-parameter AI model trained to perform across multiple drug discovery tasks including property prediction, ADMET screening, molecular optimization, affinity prediction, and retrosynthesis planning. Financial terms of the partnership were not disclosed. The deal does not involve any specific drug candidates or biological targets; it is structured as a technology co-development arrangement in which Liquid AI contributes its Liquid Foundation Model architecture and Insilico contributes its proprietary MMAI Gym for Science training platform, which contains over 1,000 pharmaceutical benchmarks and approximately 120 billion tokens of data across more than 200 tasks. No territorial restrictions were described, and the partnership appears global in scope.
The model is designed for on-premise deployment, allowing pharmaceutical companies to run drug discovery AI models on private infrastructure without transmitting proprietary molecular or assay data to external cloud services. According to the companies, LFM2-2.6B-MMAI outperformed TxGemma-27B on 13 of 22 pharmacokinetics and toxicology tasks, reached molecular optimization success rates of up to 98.8% on MuMO-Instruct benchmarks, and produced better correlation scores than GPT-5.1, Claude Opus 4.5, and Grok-4.1 on an internal affinity prediction benchmark covering 2.5 million experimental measurements across 689 protein targets.
Deal context
This is the first known collaboration between the two companies. Liquid AI was founded in 2023, raised a USD 37.5 million seed round in December 2023, and closed a USD 250 million Series A in December 2024. The company has no prior pharmaceutical partnerships on record, making this deal its entry into the life sciences sector. Insilico Medicine, by contrast, has built an extensive roster of AI drug discovery partnerships. These include a deal with Sanofi initiated in November 2022 valued at up to approximately USD 1.2 billion, an expanded collaboration with Eli Lilly in 2025 worth more than USD 100 million in upfront and milestone payments, and a multi-year oncology R&D collaboration with Servier announced in 2025 valued at up to USD 888 million with USD 32 million upfront. Insilico has also entered licensing arrangements with Menarini/Stemline (USD 550 million), TaiGen, Atossa Therapeutics, and Prelude Therapeutics.