Anthropic acquires stealth biotech AI startup Coefficient Bio in $400 million stock deal
The acquisition accelerates Anthropic's push into life sciences, adding a ten-person team of computational drug discovery veterans to its health division.
Anthropic has acquired Coefficient Bio, a stealth-stage biotech AI startup, in a deal valued at approximately $400 million in stock, according to reporting by The Information and journalist Eric Newcomer, with sources close to the transaction confirming the close to TechCrunch. The startup, co-founded by Samuel Stanton and Nathan C.
Frey — both veterans of computational drug discovery at Genentech's Prescient Design unit — was focused on using AI to make drug discovery and biological research more efficient.
The approximately ten-person Coefficient Bio team is expected to join Anthropic's health and life sciences division. The acquisition deepens Anthropic's strategic bet on healthcare as a major vertical for its Claude models.
In October 2025, the company announced Claude for Life Sciences, a product aimed at helping scientific researchers accelerate discovery workflows.
The deal signals that Anthropic is willing to deploy capital aggressively to staff up specialized AI research capabilities, even as it continues to grow its general-purpose Claude platform. The company raised $30 billion in February 2026 at a $380 billion valuation, giving it substantial resources to pursue acquisitions alongside organic development.
The acquisition also comes as AI labs more broadly are racing to establish credibility in regulated, high-stakes industries like biopharma, where the potential economic value of AI-assisted drug discovery is enormous. OpenAI has similarly been investing in scientific research capabilities through its now-dissolved OpenAI for Science unit, and Google DeepMind's AlphaFold work has already demonstrated the potential of AI in biology.
Read the original reporting at TechCrunch.
