HITS has closed an 18.3 billion Korean won Series B round, worth approximately $13.4 million, bringing its cumulative investment to 28.6 billion won. The South Korean AI drug development company plans to launch its AI Co-Scientist in November after beta testing by about 300 researchers. The platform combines specialized AI models, databases and multiple AI agents to support literature searches, data analysis, molecular design, toxicity assessment and other stages of drug research. HyperLab Co-Scientist scored 94% on BixBench-Verified-50, 84% on the Frontier Science Olympiad and 69.7% on Anthropic’s BioMysteryBench, although HITS said performance can vary by model, data access and tools and still requires validation in real research settings. The company plans to connect the system with electronic lab notebooks and, through proof-of-concept work with autonomous-lab companies, ultimately link it to automated experiments by 2027.