Ex-SignalFire Investor Sahir Raoof Raises $27.5M Debut Fund for AI Drug Development

Sahir Raoof has closed $27.5 million for his first solo venture fund, one of the hardest feats for a first-time manager in today's market. His firm, Proximal Ventures, will back startups that use AI to reshape the tools, infrastructure, and services behind drug development.

The bet rests on a simple observation about how pharmaceutical companies spend money. Drugmakers have long outsourced chunks of their work to specialized service providers: synthesizing thousands of molecular compounds, working out large-scale manufacturing, and analyzing clinical trial data. Raoof thinks AI can automate much of that work, letting startups deliver the same services at lower cost and in far less time — and capture billions of dollars of pharmaceutical industry spending in the process.

"For a long time, the assumption was that pharma is not a great buyer of software, but a really good buyer of services," Raoof told TechCrunch. In his view, that assumption is now breaking down. AI has already produced some of its most valuable applications in service-heavy industries like law and finance, and Raoof sees pharmaceutical services following the same path.

What does the fund actually do?

Proximal Ventures invests at the pre-seed and seed stages. It writes checks between $500,000 and $1.5 million. The firm has already backed six startups.

One of them is ChronicleBio, co-founded by former OpenAI executive Fidji Simo. ChronicleBio applies AI to biological and medical data to better understand chronic diseases and identify potential treatments. The other five portfolio companies were not named in the source.

The fund's strategy draws directly on Raoof's operating background. Before spending two years as a principal at SignalFire, he led business development at Iterative Health, a clinical trial recruitment startup. Before that, he oversaw partnerships at Flatiron Health, the oncology data company Roche acquired for $1.9 billion in 2018.

Who backed the debut manager?

First-time fund managers face one of the toughest fundraising environments in years, while established firms keep attracting capital. Raoof cleared the bar anyway. His limited partners include:

• Institutional VC firms: SignalFire and Kleiner Perkins
• Corporate investor: Bertelsmann Healthcare Investments
• Individual investors: Dimension Capital co-founders Nan Li and Zavain Dar
• Amy Abernethy, co-founder of Highlander Health and former principal deputy commissioner of the FDA

Abernethy knows Raoof from Flatiron Health, where she served as chief medical officer. She told TechCrunch that his ability to build relationships and spot industry bottlenecks made a lasting impression. She is convinced his abilities, combined with an understanding of what the healthcare market needs, will make him a successful investor.

Why does the operating background matter?

Selling into life sciences is a specific, slow, relationship-driven problem. "If you're building a company that's selling into the life sciences, one of the hardest things to do is starting that initial commercial flywheel," Raoof said.

That is the gap Proximal claims to fill. Limited partners cited Raoof's sales experience, his understanding of the healthcare ecosystem, and his industry relationships as reasons to trust he can both spot strong startups and help them land customers. Abernethy added that these qualities have already let Proximal invest alongside some of the better-known, much larger funds — an unusual position for a $27.5 million debut vehicle competing for allocations in hot AI deals.

The test ahead is execution. Proximal now has six bets placed, a network of pharma-savvy backers, and a thesis that AI collapses the cost of drug-development services. If Raoof is right, the services layer of the pharmaceutical industry becomes the next service sector, after law and finance, where AI-native startups take share from incumbents.