# Coefficient Bio

> Source: https://aiwiki.ai/wiki/coefficient_bio
> Updated: 2026-10-28
> Fact-checked: 2026-10-25
> Categories: AI Companies, Drug Discovery, Healthcare AI
> License: CC BY 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) - attribute to "AI Wiki (aiwiki.ai)"
> Cite as: AI Wiki. "Coefficient Bio." aiwiki.ai, 28 Oct 2026. https://aiwiki.ai/wiki/coefficient_bio
> From AI Wiki (https://aiwiki.ai), the free encyclopedia of artificial intelligence. Reuse freely with attribution.

**Coefficient Bio** was a stealth-stage biotechnology and artificial-intelligence startup that, according to multiple press reports, was acquired by [Anthropic](https://aiwiki.ai/wiki/anthropic) in an all-stock deal reported at just over $400 million and disclosed in early April 2026.[1][2][3] The New York-based company, co-founded in September 2025 by a group that included two former computational-drug-discovery researchers from [Genentech](https://aiwiki.ai/wiki/genentech)'s Prescient Design unit, was building AI models for biological research and drug discovery.[1][4][17] The acquisition was widely read as Anthropic's most direct move yet into [AI for the life sciences](https://aiwiki.ai/wiki/ai_for_science), extending a strategy anchored by the company's [Claude for Life Sciences](https://aiwiki.ai/wiki/claude_for_life_sciences) product. Anthropic did not publicly confirm the purchase price, and the $400 million figure rests on reporting by The Information and the journalist Eric Newcomer (and, according to FierceBiotech, Coefficient's PitchBook entry) rather than on any official Anthropic disclosure.[2][3][4] Both best-known co-founders later described the company on their own profiles as acquired by Anthropic, where they went on to work in its life-sciences research effort.[14][15][17]

## Overview

Coefficient Bio operated in stealth, with no publicly released product, disclosed revenue, or conventional traction metrics at the time the deal became public.[6] Press accounts describe a small, research-heavy team, most of them former Genentech computational biologists, working on AI systems intended to make [drug discovery](https://aiwiki.ai/wiki/ai_drug_discovery) and broader biological research more efficient.[1][6] Reported headcounts vary: TechCrunch said around 10 people, The Next Web and PYMNTS said fewer than 10, pharmaphorum described a nine-person company, and FierceBiotech cited PitchBook as listing six employees.[1][4][6][7][10] According to The Information, as relayed by R&D World and PYMNTS, the platform the team had built enabled AI to draft drug research-and-development plans, manage clinical and regulatory strategy, and identify new drug candidates.[8][10] Newcomer characterized the startup as "pursuing nothing short of artificial [superintelligence](https://aiwiki.ai/wiki/superintelligence) for science," and quoted a January 2026 recruiting post on X by co-founder Samuel Stanton: "We're ushering biopharma into the Intelligence Age. It will change everything about how the industry learns and makes decisions."[3] Those phrases are a journalist's summary and the company's own recruiting language, and should be read as aspiration rather than as a description of shipped capability.

The Information first reported the acquisition on April 2, 2026 (U.S. time), citing a person with knowledge of the deal; Newcomer's post, based on a Dimension letter to its limited partners, went out about two minutes later the same evening (its byline shows April 3, the UTC date); TechCrunch, The Next Web, R&D World and PYMNTS followed on April 3, and FierceBiotech and BioSpace on April 6.[2][3][1][6][8][10][4][5] Sources close to the deal told TechCrunch that the transaction had closed but declined to comment on the amount, so the dollar figure remains attributed rather than confirmed.[1] Dimension and Anthropic declined to comment to Newcomer.[3] The incoming team was reported to be joining Anthropic's healthcare and life-sciences organization, which Newcomer and The Next Web said was led by Eric Kauderer-Abrams.[3][6]

## Founding and team

Coefficient Bio's two most widely reported co-founders, Samuel Stanton and Nathan C. Frey, both previously worked in computational drug discovery at [Prescient Design](https://aiwiki.ai/wiki/prescient_design), the AI-focused computational-biology unit inside Genentech (part of Roche).[1] Stanton's own biography states that he co-founded Coefficient Bio in September 2025, consistent with Newcomer's description of a company "formally founded only eight months ago" at the time of the April 2026 deal.[17][3] FierceBiotech, citing Coefficient's LinkedIn page, reported two further co-founders: Aris Theologis, listed as chief executive, who had previously been chief business officer at Evozyne and a vice president at Paragon Biosciences, and Joyce Hong, previously a principal at Roivant Sciences for nearly five years; FierceBiotech described Frey as the company's chief technology officer.[4] pharmaphorum also named Theologis as the company's leader and Hong as a co-founder.[7]

Frey's public research profile is substantial and independently verifiable: he holds a PhD in materials science and engineering from the University of Pennsylvania, where he was an NDSEG fellow, was a postdoctoral fellow at MIT, and was a group leader at Genentech, where he worked on lab-in-the-loop therapeutic antibody design, discrete diffusion, interpretability, and foundation models for drug discovery.[14] He has published in venues such as Nature Machine Intelligence and Science Advances, and his paper "Protein Discovery with Discrete Walk-Jump Sampling," on generative [machine learning](https://aiwiki.ai/wiki/machine_learning) for [biomolecule design](https://aiwiki.ai/wiki/protein_folding), received an Outstanding Paper Award at ICLR 2024.[6][8][14] R&D World reported that at Prescient Design he led a multidisciplinary team working on biological [foundation models](https://aiwiki.ai/wiki/foundation_model), sat on Roche and Genentech's Foundation Model and Large Molecule Drug Discovery leadership teams, and established Prescient's collaboration with NVIDIA.[8] Stanton was a machine learning scientist at Prescient Design, where his research covered machine learning methods and drug-discovery applications, particularly antibody design; he holds a PhD from the NYU Center for Data Science, advised by Andrew Gordon Wilson, and a master's degree in operations research from Cornell University.[17] His published work spans [Bayesian optimization](https://aiwiki.ai/wiki/bayesian_optimization) and generative methods for biological sequence and protein design.[16] The value of the deal was understood by observers to lie primarily in the team and its expertise rather than in any revenue-generating product, a structure often described as an acqui-hire.[6]

Reporting by Newcomer identified the venture firm Dimension as the company's lead backer, holding roughly a 50 percent stake.[3] The Next Web described Dimension as a New York firm founded in 2023 by former Lux Capital and Obvious Ventures partners Adam Goulburn, Zavain Dar, and Nan Li.[6] Newcomer reported that Dimension was boasting an internal rate of return of 38,513 percent on the investment.[3] That eye-catching IRR became one of the most-shared details of the story, though it derives from a single investor letter and should be treated as a reported figure.

## The Anthropic acquisition

The deal was structured as an all-stock acquisition. Newcomer's account, based on the Dimension letter, put the value at "just over $400 million in stock,"[3] while The Information described it as roughly $400 million.[2] Measured against the $380 billion post-money valuation Anthropic set in its $30 billion Series G round in February 2026, R&D World calculated that the deal represented roughly 0.1 percent dilution.[8][10] Because Anthropic declined to comment publicly on the price, and because the figure traces to The Information's reporting and the investor letter rather than to a company filing or press release, this article treats the $400 million number as reported and unconfirmed.

It was not Anthropic's first acquisition: Newcomer and R&D World listed the team behind the Bun [JavaScript](https://aiwiki.ai/wiki/javascript) runtime and the computer-use agent startup Vercept as previous Anthropic acquisitions.[3][8] Orr Inbar, chief executive of the clinical-trial simulation company QuantHealth, told PharmaVoice that it was "the first acquisition of a tech-bio company in a long time."[18]

## Strategic rationale (Anthropic in biology and science)

The purchase sits within a deliberate, roughly half-year expansion of Anthropic's presence in healthcare and the life sciences. In October 2025 the company launched [Claude for Life Sciences](https://aiwiki.ai/wiki/claude_for_life_sciences), a configuration of its [Claude](https://aiwiki.ai/wiki/claude) models aimed at supporting researchers across the discovery-to-commercialization pipeline.[11][13] That product added connectors to scientific platforms including Benchling, PubMed, BioRender, Synapse.org, and 10x Genomics, alongside [Agent Skills](https://aiwiki.ai/wiki/agent_skills) and a life-sciences prompt library.[11] Anthropic reported that its [Claude Sonnet 4.5](https://aiwiki.ai/wiki/claude_sonnet_4_5) model scored 0.83 on the Protocol QA benchmark, above a human baseline of 0.79, with comparable gains on the BixBench bioinformatics evaluation.[11] On January 11, 2026, the company introduced Claude for Healthcare and expanded the life-sciences tools to areas ranging from clinical trial management to regulatory operations.[12] By the time of the deal, pharmaphorum reported, pharmaceutical companies using the platform included Novo Nordisk, Sanofi, and AbbVie.[7]

Against that backdrop, acquiring a team of computational biologists who had worked on protein design, biomolecular modeling, and R&D planning tools is a natural complement. Where Claude for Life Sciences adapted a general-purpose model to scientific workflows through connectors and integrations, R&D World wrote, Coefficient Bio had been building biology-specific [AI models](https://aiwiki.ai/wiki/ai_in_healthcare) from the ground up.[8] The Next Web placed the deal in a wider race among technology companies in drug discovery, alongside Google DeepMind's spin-off [Isomorphic Labs](https://aiwiki.ai/wiki/isomorphic_labs), NVIDIA's five-year, $1 billion AI co-innovation lab with Eli Lilly, and OpenAI's work with Moderna.[6] Anthropic's leadership has long argued that accelerating biology and health is among the most valuable potential applications of advanced AI. In his October 2024 essay "Machines of Loving Grace," [Dario Amodei](https://aiwiki.ai/wiki/dario_amodei) wrote that "the right way to think of AI is not as a method of data analysis, but as a virtual biologist who performs all the tasks biologists do," and predicted that AI-enabled biology and medicine could compress the progress of the next 50-100 years into 5-10 years.[20]

## After the acquisition

As of 25 October 2026, both of the best-known co-founders describe themselves as working at Anthropic. Frey's personal website says he leads drug discovery and development research at Anthropic and that his team is building a "pipeline-in-a-person" approach meant "to enable a single skilled biotech operator + a bunch of Claudes to create and operate drug programs"; his Google Scholar profile lists "Life Sciences at Anthropic. Prev Co-Founder, Coefficient Bio (acq. by Anthropic)."[14][15] PharmaVoice, citing Frey's LinkedIn profile, described him in late April 2026 as Anthropic's life sciences lead.[18] Stanton's website says he is a member of technical staff on the Life Science Research team at Anthropic, working on AI for scientific discovery, and that Coefficient Bio "was acquired by Anthropic in April 2026."[17]

Anthropic's life-sciences push continued after the deal. On June 30, 2026, it launched [Claude Science](https://aiwiki.ai/wiki/claude_science) in beta, describing it as "an AI workbench for scientists."[21] MIT Technology Review, quoting Kauderer-Abrams as Anthropic's head of life sciences, reported that the company would also use the product to pursue its own research into drug candidates for neglected diseases.[19]

On 27 October 2026 Anthropic disclosed that it had acquired [Mithril Medicine](https://aiwiki.ai/wiki/mithril_medicine), a one-person company developing treatments for two rare forms of muscular dystrophy; a technical report released the same day says the acquisition took place in July 2026.[22][23] Mithril's founder, Cody Tranbarger, wrote that time spent with Frey and the Coefficient Bio team gave him his first experience of "AI at the frontier" and led to the "Pipeline-in-a-Person" idea, which he said was central to the vision behind Anthropic's purchase of Mithril.[24]

## Significance

For Anthropic, Coefficient Bio signaled that the company intended to compete not only on general-purpose [generative AI](https://aiwiki.ai/wiki/generative_ai) but also in specialized scientific domains where rivals such as Google DeepMind, through protein-structure work like [AlphaFold](https://aiwiki.ai/wiki/alphafold), and OpenAI have invested. Bringing in researchers from Genentech's Prescient Design added computational-biology expertise to a company whose earlier life-sciences work had centered on adapting general-purpose models.[8]

For the broader market, the deal became a talking point well beyond its size. The combination of a roughly eight-month-old, sub-ten-person startup, a reported $400 million all-stock valuation, and a five-figure-percentage investor IRR drew attention to frontier labs paying large sums to absorb tiny research teams before those teams ship a product.[6] Inbar told PharmaVoice he would be watching whether the combined team could produce a viable drug discovery and development model within the next few years.[18] Much of what is publicly known about Coefficient Bio rests on a single round of reporting, an investor letter, and the founders' own profiles rather than on detailed technical disclosure.

## Key facts

| Item | Detail |
| --- | --- |
| Company | Coefficient Bio |
| Type | Stealth-stage biotech / AI startup |
| Headquarters | New York[4][7] |
| Acquirer | [Anthropic](https://aiwiki.ai/wiki/anthropic) |
| Reported deal value | About $400 million (The Information); just over $400 million in stock (Eric Newcomer); not officially confirmed by Anthropic[2][3] |
| Deal first reported | April 2, 2026, by The Information (U.S. time); widely covered April 3[2][10][1] |
| Co-founders | Samuel Stanton and Nathan C. Frey; FierceBiotech, citing LinkedIn, also lists Aris Theologis (CEO) and Joyce Hong[1][4] |
| Prior employer (Stanton, Frey) | Genentech, Prescient Design (computational drug discovery) |
| Founded | September 2025, per Stanton (about eight months before the deal)[17] |
| Team size | Reported as fewer than 10 people (estimates range from six to about ten)[1][4][6] |
| Focus | AI models for biological research: drug R&D planning, clinical/regulatory strategy, identifying drug candidates[8][10] |
| Lead investor | Dimension (reported ~50% stake; reported 38,513% IRR)[3] |
| Joins | Anthropic's healthcare and life-sciences group (led by Eric Kauderer-Abrams)[3] |
| Strategic context | Extends [Claude for Life Sciences](https://aiwiki.ai/wiki/claude_for_life_sciences) (Oct 2025) and Claude for Healthcare (Jan 2026)[11][12] |

## References

1. TechCrunch, "Anthropic buys biotech startup Coefficient Bio in $400M deal: Reports," April 3, 2026. https://techcrunch.com/2026/04/03/anthropic-buys-biotech-startup-coefficient-bio-in-400m-deal-reports/
2. The Information, "Anthropic Acquires Startup Coefficient Bio for About $400 Million," April 2, 2026. https://www.theinformation.com/articles/anthropic-acquires-startup-coefficient-bio-400-million
3. Newcomer (Eric Newcomer), "Anthropic Buys Stealth Dimension-Backed Coefficient Bio in $400M+ Stock Deal," April 3, 2026. https://www.newcomer.co/p/anthropic-buys-stealth-dimension
4. FierceBiotech, "Anthropic acquires stealth AI startup Coefficient Bio in $400M deal: reports," April 6, 2026. https://www.fiercebiotech.com/biotech/anthropic-acquires-stealth-ai-startup-coefficient-bio-400m-deal
5. BioSpace, "AI Giant Anthropic Leans Into Life Sciences With $400M Coefficient Bio Catch," April 2026. https://www.biospace.com/business/ai-giant-anthropic-leans-into-life-sciences-with-400m-coefficient-bio-catch
6. The Next Web, "Anthropic just paid $400 million for a startup with fewer than 10 people," April 2026. https://thenextweb.com/news/anthropic-just-paid-400-million-for-a-startup-with-fewer-than-10-people
7. pharmaphorum, "AI giant Anthropic buys Coefficient Bio for $400m," April 2026. https://pharmaphorum.com/news/ai-giant-anthropic-buys-coefficient-bio-400m
8. R&D World, "Anthropic's $400M acquisition of Coefficient Bio signals a deeper push into drug discovery," April 2026. https://www.rdworldonline.com/anthropics-400m-acquisition-of-coefficient-bio-signals-a-deeper-push-into-drug-discovery/
9. Benzinga, "Anthropic Acquires Stealth Startup Coefficient Bio For $400 Million: Report," April 4, 2026. https://www.benzinga.com/m-a/26/04/51649388/anthropic-acquires-stealth-startup-coefficient-bio-400-million
10. PYMNTS, "Anthropic Targets BioTech Growth With $400 Million Coefficient Bio Buy," April 2026. https://www.pymnts.com/acquisitions/2026/anthropic-targets-biotech-growth-with-400-million-coefficient-bio-buy/
11. Anthropic, "Claude for Life Sciences," October 20, 2025. https://www.anthropic.com/news/claude-for-life-sciences
12. Anthropic, "Advancing Claude in healthcare and the life sciences," January 11, 2026. https://www.anthropic.com/news/healthcare-life-sciences
13. CNBC, "Anthropic launches Claude Life Sciences to give researchers an AI efficiency boost," October 20, 2025. https://www.cnbc.com/2025/10/20/anthropic-claude-life-sciences-research-ai.html
14. Nathan C. Frey, personal website (accessed October 25, 2026). https://ncfrey.com/
15. Nathan C. Frey, Google Scholar profile. https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=IMUja60AAAAJ&hl=en
16. Samuel Stanton, Google Scholar profile. https://scholar.google.com/citations?hl=en&user=r2Gjhg4AAAAJ
17. Samuel Stanton, "Bio," personal website (accessed October 25, 2026). https://samuelstanton.github.io/bio.html
18. PharmaVoice, "Why AI maker Anthropic's deal with Coefficient Bio could be a pharma turning point," April 28, 2026. https://www.pharmavoice.com/news/anthropic-coefficient-bio-pharma-drug-deal-nvidia/818599/
19. MIT Technology Review, "Claude Science is Anthropic's newest flagship product," June 30, 2026. https://www.technologyreview.com/2026/06/30/1139987/claude-science-is-anthropics-newest-flagship-product/
20. Dario Amodei, "Machines of Loving Grace: How AI Could Transform the World for the Better," October 2024. https://www.darioamodei.com/essay/machines-of-loving-grace
21. Anthropic, "Claude Science, an AI workbench for scientists, is now available," June 30, 2026. https://www.anthropic.com/news/claude-science-ai-workbench
22. Anthropic, "Early progress on accelerating drug development with Claude," October 27, 2026. https://www.anthropic.com/research/early-progress-drug-development
23. Tranbarger, C.; Mithril Medicine, "Preclinical Characterization of a Bispecific Bridging Antibody for the Treatment of LAMA2-Related Congenital Muscular Dystrophy," technical report, October 26, 2026. https://www-cdn.anthropic.com/52e1f5d50c47ca3818f56704c27cf19e59b62e77.pdf
24. Cody Tranbarger (@Prof_Oak_), post on X, October 27, 2026. https://x.com/Prof_Oak_/status/2115185849424048564