ByteDance Spins Off Drug Unit, Keeps 56% After $290 Million Raise

ByteDance's AI drug-discovery unit, Anew Labs, raised $290 million in its first outside funding round at a $1.5 billion valuation, with ByteDance retaining a 56 percent stake, TheNextWeb reported Sept. 16, citing Reuters. Reuters attributed the figures to people familiar with the matter rather than to a company statement, which is the same single-sourcing pattern that has carried most of this week's China-linked funding news and that neither ByteDance nor Anew Labs has independently confirmed in public.

The round was led by HSG, the China-focused firm formerly known as Sequoia China, alongside IDG Capital and Hillhouse Investment, with 5Y Capital as co-lead. Gaorong Ventures, Primavera Venture Partners, Boyu Capital, the state-backed Shanghai Future Industries Fund and SBP Group, as a strategic investor, also took part, according to the same reporting.

Why ByteDance carved it out

Anew Labs develops structure-prediction and protein-design models, Protenix and PXDesign, that generate drug candidates computationally rather than through the trial-and-error screening that has defined most of the industry. TheNextWeb's account said the spin-off was meant to let the unit run on the industry logic of drug discovery, which moves on clinical-trial and regulatory timelines measured in years, rather than the product-cycle logic that governs the rest of ByteDance's business.

A separate South China Morning Post report on the unit's scientific work, independent of the funding story, named Chris Li as head of biology and listed a scientific advisory board that includes Liu Yongjun, formerly president of Innovent Biologics; Ji Ma, formerly a principal scientist at Amgen; and Hua Zou, scientific director of protein chemistry at Takeda in California. SCMP said the unit has four drug candidates in its pipeline, including an autoimmune treatment it described as "designed by generative AI," which was presented at the Immunology2026 conference in Boston in April.

What is still unverified

Neither report names a chief executive on the record, and Anew Labs' own website listed only 36 core team members as of May, according to SCMP, against Reuters' figure of roughly 50 core staff transferred in the spin-off, a gap the two accounts do not reconcile. TheNextWeb's report names Liu Kai, previously of IDG Capital and Fire Stone Investment, as the unit's head, sourced to people familiar with the deal rather than to Anew Labs itself.

Anew Labs operates out of Shanghai, Singapore and San Jose, California, positioning it to sell into both Chinese and U.S. drug-development markets simultaneously, though neither report says how revenue, if any, splits between them. The unit is also referred to as Anew Therapeutics or ByteDance AI Drug Discovery in earlier coverage, a naming inconsistency that mirrors Google's Artemis project, another large platform company's AI effort that has drawn scrutiny over what it is actually called and who built what inside it.

Investor	Role in the round
HSG	Lead
IDG Capital	Lead
Hillhouse Investment	Lead
5Y Capital	Co-lead
Shanghai Future Industries Fund	Participant

ByteDance's own AI ambitions keep expanding past its core apps business; OpenAI's roughly $300 million purchase of camera startup Glass Imaging this month is the same pattern from a different lab, a company built on one AI product line buying or spinning off a unit in an entirely different physical-world domain. The next confirming event for Anew Labs would be a public statement from ByteDance itself, or a regulatory filing naming the investors Reuters has so far attributed only to unnamed sources.