Sahir Raoof closed a $27.5 million inaugural fund for Proximal Ventures, betting that artificial intelligence can automate services pharmaceutical companies have historically outsourced at premium rates.
Raoof, a former SignalFire principal and business development executive at Flatiron Health and Iterative Health, plans to deploy capital in $500,000 to $1.5 million checks at pre-seed and seed stages. The fund has already backed seven companies.
The thesis rests on a structural opportunity: pharma outsources drug development services—molecular synthesis, manufacturing scale-up, clinical trial data analysis—more readily than it adopts software. AI can compress timelines and slash costs on these services, Raoof said, pointing to similar automation gains in legal and financial services. The addressable market spans billions in annual industry spending.
ChronicleBio, co-founded by former OpenAI executive Fidji Simo, is among Proximal's initial investments. The startup uses AI to analyze biological and medical data to improve understanding of chronic diseases and identify treatments.
Raoof's backers include VC firms SignalFire and Kleiner Perkins, Bertelsmann Healthcare Investments, and individual investors Nan Li and Zavain Dar of Dimension Capital. Amy Abernethy, co-founder of Highlander Health and former principal deputy commissioner of the FDA, also invested. Abernethy, who worked with Raoof at Flatiron as chief medical officer, said his ability to recognize industry bottlenecks and build customer relationships across pharma were decisive.
Raoof identified customer acquisition as the critical hurdle for early-stage life sciences companies. His background in healthcare sales and relationships give him operational leverage in that bottleneck.
