Kuano

What Kuano does

Kuano Ltd. is a Cambridge, UK-based computational drug discovery company founded in 2020 that has built the Quantum Lens platform — an integrated quantum simulation and AI stack for the design of small-molecule enzyme inhibitors. The platform combines automated quantum mechanics (QM), molecular dynamics (MD) and QM/MM simulations with methods including FEP, MMPBSA, SAPT, FMO/PIEDA, DFT and DMRG, alongside proprietary 'Quantum Fingerprints' and AI generative models (reaction-informed GNNs, RNNs, genetic algorithms, active learning). Modules are organised around covalent inhibitor design, hard-to-drug enzyme targets and allosteric/shallow-pocket analysis, with published validation in DNMT1 selectivity, NOTUM (dementia), SHP1/2 selectivity, bowel cancer and IRAP programmes.

The company targets pharmaceutical and biotechnology customers seeking differentiated drug candidates for enzyme targets that conventional high-throughput tools struggle to address — a market Kuano sizes at over $40bn in existing pharmaceutical sales. Disclosed enterprise engagements include Onco-Innovations (PNKP inhibitors for cancer), Nanna Therapeutics (formerly Astellas), and UCL (bowel cancer), alongside academic research collaborations with the ARUK UCL Drug Discovery Institute and the University of Bristol Mulholland Group.

Revenue is generated through project-based drug discovery services and platform access, with the potential for co-development milestone payments and royalties on successfully developed assets. Distribution is exclusively direct enterprise sales; pricing is not publicly disclosed. The company is privately held, has raised approximately £2.8M in total funding, employs 11–50 people, and is led by CEO Vid Stojevic, CTO David Wright and Executive Chairman Antonio Benedetti.

Name

Kuano

Legal name

Kuano Ltd.

Website

https://kuano.ai

Company type

Private

Founded year

2020

Operating status

Operating

Headcount range

11–50 employees

Short description

Kuano is a Cambridge, UK-based computational drug discovery company that combines quantum mechanical simulations and AI within its Quantum Lens platform to design small-molecule inhibitors for challenging enzyme targets, serving pharmaceutical and biotech clients through project-based collaborations and co-development partnerships.

Ownership category

akta.pro rank

Product category

Computational Drug Discovery / AI-Driven Pharma R&D Software

NAICS

Research and Development in Biotechnology (except Nanobiotechnology) (541714)

SIC

Services-Commercial Physical & Biological Research (8731)

akta.pro primary industry

AI/ML Platforms for Drug Discovery & Experiment Optimization (HLAGAJAO)

akta.pro secondary industries

Drug Discovery (Target ID/Validation & Hit Discovery) (HLAIALAA), In Silico / Computational Toxicology & PK/PD Modeling (HLAGAFAM)

Keywords

• Computational drug discovery
• Quantum simulation platform
• Enzyme inhibitor design
• AI drug discovery
• Pharmaceutical research software

Headquarters

HQ city

London

HQ country

United Kingdom

HQ region

Europe

Offices1 record

Markets served

GTM type

B2B

Offering type

Software

Cost components

Personnel, Technology or R&D, Infrastructure, Marketing or Sales, Operations

Revenue model

1. Drug Discovery Services and Platform Access: Kuano provides drug discovery services and platform access to pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies seeking to design differentiated drug candidates for challenging enzyme targets. Revenue is generated through project-based collaborations and potentially subscription or licensing arrangements for platform access.
2. Co-development and Collaborative Partnerships: Revenue generated through collaborative deals with pharma and biotech to leverage the technology platform to develop novel inhibitors to challenging high value enzymes. May include milestone payments and royalties on successful drug development.

Go-to-market motion1 record

Distribution channels1 record

Marketing channels5 records

Core offering

Kuano provides drug discovery services and platform access through its Quantum Lens platform, which combines quantum simulations, AI, and enzyme structural dynamics to design differentiated drug candidates for challenging enzyme targets. The company partners with pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies on project-based collaborations, co-development deals, and platform access arrangements to leverage its proprietary technology for novel inhibitor development against previously undruggable enzymes.

Product overview

Kuano offers a unified platform called Quantum Lens, which combines quantum simulation with AI for physics-based drug discovery. The platform consists of the core Quantum Lens engine augmented by specialized modules for Covalent Reactivity Design, Hard-to-Drug Enzyme Targets, and Allosteric/Shallow Pockets. These modules work together to enable transition state modeling, quantum pharmacophore identification, and AI-driven generative compound design for targeted enzyme inhibitors.

Differentiator

Problem solved

Functional benefit

Brands

• Quantum Lens: Kuano's proprietary quantum and AI platform that provides physics-based intelligence for drug discovery, enabling quantum-level simulation of enzyme dynamics and transition states to guide high-stakes discovery decisions.

Products and services

• Quantum Lens Physics-based intelligence platform for drug discovery that combines quantum simulation and AI to guide high-stakes discovery decisions. Provides quantum-resolution modeling of transition states, enzyme dynamics, and molecular behaviors to support the design of differentiated drug candidates for pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies.
• Drug Discovery Services and Co-Development Project-based drug discovery services and co-development collaborations with pharmaceutical and biotech companies to design differentiated drug candidates for challenging enzyme targets. Includes collaborative deals to leverage the Quantum Lens technology platform for novel inhibitor development, with milestone payments and royalties on successful drug development.

Quantifiable outcome

• Identified 3 novel chemotypes active against DNMT1 with high selectivity over DNMT3a and DNMT3b, synthesizing and testing only 40 compounds in 2 months
• +4 more outcomes

Named customers3 records

Segments3 records

Ideal customer profiles3 records

Technology focussed Yes

API detail

Has API

No

API docs

API detail

Core technology

AI maturity

App detail

AI capability5 records

Feature7 records

Partnerships

Ten partnerships are on record, tiered core and minor.

• Onco-Innovations LimitedcoreStrategic or Co-development Partner · 19 November 2025Pilot project using Kuano's quantum-based and AI-enabled computational methods to advance Onco's PNKP Inhibitor Technology (ONC010) for cancer treatment. Kuano delivered molecular modelling findings providing refined structural hypothesis for PNKP inhibition and framework for structure-based optimization. Project completed June 2026.
• Creative Destruction Lab (CDL)coreStrategic or Co-development Partner · 3 April 2022Kuano joined the Computational Health stream of CDL in its third session, first year in Seattle with face-to-face meetings.
• Creative Destruction Lab (CDL)coreStrategic or Co-development Partner · 1 July 2021Kuano graduated from the Quantum stream of CDL, one of the world's top deep tech accelerators. Mentors included experts from BASF Venture Capital, OTI Lumionics, Beresford Ventures, Zapata Computing, and D-Wave. CDL provided business model refinement and valuable partnerships.
• Alzheimer's Research UK UCL Drug Discovery InstitutecoreStrategic or Co-development Partner · 24 June 2021Research collaboration to identify new leads as inhibitors of NOTUM carboxylesterase for dementia treatment. Kuano simulates the quantum transition state of NOTUM enzyme, identifies the pharmacophore, and models novel inhibitors for testing by ARUK UCL DDI.
• COVID-19 HPC ConsortiumminorStrategic or Co-development Partner · 28 May 2020Selected to join the COVID-19 HPC Consortium, working with AWS to identify novel COVID-19 drugs using virtual screening and machine learning. Consortium is a private-public effort with White House OSTP, US DoE, and IBM.
• CrowdHelixminorStrategic or Co-development Partner · 17 April 2020SME member of CrowdHelix, a EU and UK focused community of over 4,030 SMEs and research & innovation professionals enabling collaborations and partnerships.
• CompBioMedminorStrategic or Co-development Partner · 7 April 2020Joined as associate partner of CompBioMed, a European HPC Centre of Excellence. Brings together academic institutions (UCL, Oxford, Edinburgh), HPC centres, and industry partners (Janssen, AstraZeneca, GSK). Provides access to compute resources and collaborative research.
• University of Bristol (Mulholland Group)coreStrategic or Co-development PartnerCollaborative research with Adrian Mulholland's group modelling reaction mechanism of IRAP (Insulin-regulated aminopeptidase), published in Journal of Chemical Information and Modeling. Collaboration used molecular and quantum simulations to understand selectivity at molecular level.
• Kings College LondonminorStrategic or Co-development PartnerProf. George Booth serves as advisor, Physics Professor at Kings College London.
• Imperial College LondonminorStrategic or Co-development PartnerJarvist Moore-Frost serves as advisor, Royal Society Research Fellow at Imperial College London.

Scale indicators5 records

Recent moves6 records

Expansion highlights5 records

Direct peers

• Schrödinger: Direct peer and category-defining competitor in computational/AI drug discovery. Schrödinger's LiveDesign platform with FEP+ is the incumbent benchmark that Kuano's Quantum Lens must outperform. Both target pharma/biotech enterprise customers with physics-based molecular simulation for small molecule discovery.
• XtalPi: AI + quantum-physics-driven drug discovery platform targeting small molecule design. Direct peer — combines quantum mechanics with AI to predict crystal structures and binding affinities, and now operates an integrated CRO/CDMO after acquiring Crown Bio/Pharmaron.
• Insilico Medicine: AI-driven drug discovery platform with end-to-end capabilities from target identification through clinical development. Competes for similar pharma/biotech partnerships and shares the 'physics + AI' positioning, though Insilico is broader and much better capitalized.
• Recursion Pharmaceuticals: AI-driven drug discovery company combining high-throughput experimental biology with machine learning. Broader platform but competes for the same enterprise pharma partnerships and represents the well-capitalized public-market benchmark for the AI drug discovery category.
• Exscientia: AI-driven small molecule drug discovery company with pharma partnerships. Direct peer in target identification, hit generation, and lead optimization — same customer segment and similar service/platform offering to Kuano.
• Atomwise: AI-driven small molecule discovery using structure-based design and virtual screening. Competes in similar pharma/biotech enterprise customer segment with platform-and-partnership business model.
• BenevolentAI: AI-driven drug discovery company using knowledge graphs and ML for target identification and drug design. Public-market peer competing for similar enterprise pharma partnerships, though more focused on target identification than physics-based design.

Emerging players

• Iambic Therapeutics: AI/quantum-mechanics-driven drug discovery startup (formerly Entos). Closest conceptual peer to Kuano in marrying quantum chemistry with AI for small molecule design, though focused on broader target classes rather than purely enzymes.

Regional players

• Domainex: UK-based integrated drug discovery CRO with medicinal chemistry, biology, and computational chemistry capabilities. Not a direct quantum-platform competitor but a comparable UK-headquartered CRO and prior employer of Kuano's EVP BD Cat Stace — a relevant comp for service-based business model and regional competitive dynamics.

Others

• Cyclica (acquired by Recursion): AI-driven polypharmacology and proteome-wide target profiling platform. Acquired by Recursion in 2023. Comparable as an AI-drug-discovery platform vendor with similar enterprise GTM motion to Kuano, illustrating both the consolidation path and the competitive intensity in the category.

Market position

Strengths5 records

Weaknesses5 records

Competitive moat3 records

Key risks7 records

Key highlights7 records

Customer concentration

• Xx.com/QuantumKuano
• LinkedInlinkedin.com/company/kuano

Revenue estimate

Valuation estimate

Number of profiles

Profiles14 records

Funding overview

Funding rounds4 records

Investors8 records

Funding detail is available on the Subscription and Enterprise plan.Contact sales →

M&A

Investments

M&A and investment is available on the Subscription and Enterprise plan.Contact sales →

Frequently asked questions about Kuano