apologies if this is wildly inaccurate, but is it fair to characterize your startup as helping people create custom drugs the same way ARM helped people create custom chips? from the outside, it seems like there could be intriguing parallels.
But yes, we are very interested in helping people get made what they want to get made. It often falls into two situations:
(1) If the customer knows exactly the custom design they want to get made, we can help them find the best way to purchase or synthesize it. In many cases, customers may have trouble coordinating with CROs themselves, finding the best building blocks and route to the molecule, and dealing with logistics. We try to help ease that pain.
(2) The customer has a specific target they want to hit and they need just the right small molecule to "fit" in it. We also help with this, mainly through partnerships. And our thinking is that good design of small molecule inhibitors (such as one targeting the COVID main protease) involves expert knowledge of what can be quickly made and tested to help guide further design.
Lastly, we also work on suggesting molecules that may be slightly different from what the customer thinks they want, but may show similar activity -- and will be much easier to make.
in the end, if your value tilts more toward logistics than IP, you may want to mine chemistry.com (?) for lessons, a startup from the dot-com boom funded by john doerr and kleiner perkins. the grand vision was to disrupt and streamline the logistics of the chemical industry.
If the article is correct, high costs for building and maintaining the "Amazon for chemicals" were the primary cause of failure.
Many great ideas are a matter of when, not if. Knowing when to launch is as critical for entrepreneurs as is knowing when to buy for investors.
A modern Chemdex might thrive like the modern Webvan (ie Instacart) because if costs were the cause of death, a cloud infrastructure would address this issue.
Obviously, this is a very different model from the ARM model.
Hopefully one of these comparisons can offer helpful insights.