Biology meets artificial and human intelligencefor next-generation therapeutics

hello@onava.ai
High-Throughput Assays
From thousands to hundreds of billions of variants per campaign, our proprietary assay platforms generate the scale of data needed to find functional candidates that binding-only approaches miss.
Protein Engineering
Our AI models are trained on functional biological outcomes — neutralization, cell killing, pathway inhibition — so every optimization cycle moves toward candidates that are more potent, more developable, and more likely to translate.
Agentic AI
Our agentic orchestration layer automates model training and experimental feedback across programs simultaneously, compressing timelines without compromising the rigor that clinical translation demands.

Why we are different. Onava is an AI drug discovery platform building the next generation of bispecific antibody discovery. We design and operate proprietary wet-lab assay platforms that generate large-scale, biologically meaningful data, and we use that data to train AI models that improve with every experiment we run.

The drug discovery industry generates enormous amounts of experimental data and throws most of it away. Each program runs in isolation, each experiment is treated as a one-time event, and the insights from failed candidates rarely inform what comes next.

Onava is built differently. Our platform compounds in value with every program we execute — a cross-program data flywheel that means the tenth candidate we optimize benefits from everything learned in the first nine. That structural advantage becomes more pronounced as we scale.

Onava platform diagram: protein engineering platform feeds high-throughput functional screening, which feeds agentic AI, which closes the loop.
Founders

Our founding team combines deep expertise in protein engineering, machine learning, and therapeutic development. We have built and scaled wet-lab platforms, trained large biological models, and advanced candidates from discovery through the clinic. We started Onava because we saw that the field was optimizing for the wrong thing — and that building from functional biology up, rather than affinity down, could change the odds for patients.

01Ido CalmanCEO & Co-Founder
02Maya HartwellCTO & Co-Founder
03Daniel ParkChief Scientific Officer
04Sara BenvenisteHead of Platform
05Ren OkoyeHead of Machine Learning
06Nora LindqvistHead of Discovery Biology

Our Mission. We believe the next generation of medicines will be built by platforms that treat every experiment as an input to something larger. Our goal is to build that infrastructure and use it to deliver better biologics, faster, against targets the industry has struggled to address.

Antibody cluster on a sphere — a visual reference for Onava's bispecific antibody discovery platform.