The problem
Traditional drug discovery burns a decade and roughly ₩1 trillion per approved therapy, with most candidates dying in trials. When CEO Kim Jin-han co-founded Standigm in May 2015 after three years at Samsung’s Advanced Institute of Technology, AI-based discovery was barely known — the inefficiency he wanted to kill.
How it works
Standigm’s workflow AI covers the early pipeline end to end: literature mining and target identification, drug repositioning, and generative design of novel small molecules via its STELLA platform. Its database stores biomedical knowledge and public data that the models learn from. For the hard cases, STELLA-MGD designs molecular glue degraders — drugs that mark disease proteins for destruction — with selectivity engineered in rather than left to chance, validated in design-test-analyze loops with experimental partners like Protai.
Pain points
Disease-causing proteins long deemed “undruggable,” degrader side effects from poor selectivity, and the cost of finding out a candidate fails only after years of work.
Business model
Pharma-facing: paid joint-discovery programs plus licensing and milestone-style deals on AI-generated candidates, keeping a first-in-class internal pipeline as leverage.
Challenges
Every candidate still faces wet-lab and clinical attrition no algorithm can waive; fundraising shifted from the planned 2021 KRX IPO to staying private; and Insilico-style rivals plus pharma in-house AI teams crowd every deal.
Funding
- Raised: $11.5M Series B (2019, Mirae Asset-led); $8.6M from SK Holdings (Nov 2019); $44.5M pre-IPO round (Mar 2021, co-led by SKS PE and Daishin Private Equity with KDB Bank, Kakao Ventures, SK Holdings and others) — its last disclosed round, intended to fund B2B sales and FDA IND filings.
- Valuation: MISSING.
Latest — September 2026
Standigm and Protai launched a joint R&D program to design selective molecular glue degraders, pairing Protai’s structural-proteomics platform with STELLA-MGD under KORIL-RDF joint-foundation support over two years — targeting proteins previous drugs couldn’t touch.