Turning molecule making into a digital workflow

Across the gamut of technological innovations with the potential to transform the life sciences industry, automation stands out as a tool poised to significantly benefit the future of biopharmaceuticals.

The industry has long attempted to identify ways to “innovate across the entire drug development process” and automation is rapidly becoming a primary means of streamlining discovery and development.

One company deeply entrenched in this work is Glasgow, Scotland-headquartered Chemify, a startup developing solutions intended to automate the entire end-to-end process of molecular development and ultimately bolster drug development. Earlier this year, the company opened its first “Chemifarm,” a laboratory for molecular design and synthesis aimed at accelerating and simplifying the drug development workflow.

Chemify is aiming to reimagine how novel molecules are discovered and synthesized by turning digital code into physical compounds through its Chemputation platform, which merges AI and advanced robotics. The platform — located at its Chemifarm — enables the “on-demand design, optimization and scale-up of molecules once deemed unreachable,” according to the company.

Advancing the drug development process

The creation of the Chemputation platform — also referred to as a programmable chemistry set — was in response to the longstanding bottleneck between chemical discovery and scalable manufacturing, a gap that has historically slowed the entire drug development process.

Chemify’s founder and CEO Lee Cronin, who is also a professor of chemistry at the University of Glasgow, emphasized the length of time it takes to go from the discovery of a chemical to the actual production of a commercial product. Following an initial discovery, he notes that there may be resulting delays in identifying, reproducing, and ultimately scaling a molecule.

“By the time they get to reproduce it, they then work out a (method to) scale up and then make sure that they’ve got a production line,” says Cronin. “(By the end) you’re talking about 10 years, even if you’re thinking about it leading to something as trivial as a pigment or a fragrance, let alone a backbone for drug discovery.”

How Chemputation works

According to the company, the Chemifarm “integrates Chemify’s Chemputation platform, an extensible programming language, advanced robotics, and the world’s largest curated library of validated reactions.”

Although the facility still resembles a conventional chemistry lab — with familiar features like fume hoods and benching — the workflow differs significantly. Chemifarms use a defined, guided flow path that functions like a production line for molecules, says Cronin.

Each run begins in a dedicated area where the experiment is prepared as a standardized “kit.” An operator receives the kit and a digitally encoded recipe, loads the ingredients into the system, and initiates the process. From there, the mixture moves through a series of stations, each automated and predetermined, as opposed to the more analog and manual workflows of conventional labs.

Cronin notes that the Chemputation platform determines at the beginning of the process whether a recipe can proceed at all. 

“If it accepts it and knows the (necessary) chemicals are in stock and that the reaction is safe, and it’s been validated on the system, it can be queued and run,” he says. “Having that set up — getting that from the lab into the actual Chemifarm and having those steps — and having it be cradle to grave, going from the code to the molecule was a really important step.”

A foregone conclusion?

Despite how the Chemifarm and Chemputation platform seem to align with current industry trends, Cronin makes the case that the launch of these services would not have appeared inevitable only a few years ago.

“The robotics revolution that was happening sometime around 2019, where basically biology and manufacturing was all being automated, then everyone thought chemistry should be easy (to automate),” says Cronin. “There was actually a whole slew of chemistry startups that started around about 2019 to 2021. And they’re all characterized by huge capital investment in robots  and they went through the cash really quickly and couldn’t do the job because chemistry was too hard.”

There were a series of challenges to overcome in this space, including the handling of corrosive chemicals, complex software requirements, and the high cost of robotics, according to Cronin.

“And meanwhile, chemistry has been done in India and China at commodity prices,” says Cronin. “So, there was no drive to really do it. Basically, people tried and it started to go wrong.”

Earlier ventures lacked the crucial combination of modern AI and a programmable language for chemistry, Cronin argues, noting that success in this space only became possible once the gap between robotics and AI was bridged — using a standardized, rules-based programming layer to translate molecular designs into automated, reproducible chemical operations.

Growth in 2025 and beyond

In October 2025, Chemify raised over $50 million in Series B funding to help accelerate its mission of becoming the global leader in digital chemistry, molecular design, and manufacturing. This was shortly after launching its first Chemifarm in June 2025.

The new Series B financing will allow Chemify to expand this blueprint globally, building a network of digital chemistry hubs and delivering on-demand molecule design and manufacturing to pharmaceutical, biotech and materials science partners everywhere. In the same announcement, Chemify revealed plans to open a Silicon Valley facility.

Looking ahead, Cronin sees Chemify’s drug development fundamentally changing by chemistry becoming a fully digital, global infrastructure

With Chemifarms positioned around the world and synthesis defined by code rather than manual craft, he believes pharmaceutical companies will be able to move from molecular idea to manufacturable compound with unprecedented speed and reliability.

“We’ll be the AWS for chemistry,” contends Cronin. “What that means is there’ll be a digital world in which people just dream up molecules, there’ll be a physical world where we best make those molecules, and there will be a kind of manufacturing world, and all three will work together.”