OpenAI has acquired Orchestra Bio, a San Francisco startup whose AI agents help drug companies keep sprawling development programs on schedule, the ChatGPT maker announced Tuesday. Financial terms were not disclosed.

"Our goal is to help scientists make discoveries and manage the work needed to turn them into treatments that reach patients sooner," OpenAI said in the announcement.

Orchestra's team and platform will be folded into Rosalind, OpenAI's family of AI models and tools for biologists and chemists. OpenAI did not say what it paid for the startup or when its agents will appear inside the suite, leaving the price and the integration timeline as the main open questions to watch as the combined platform takes shape.

The acquisition targets one of the most stubborn bottlenecks in medicine. Getting a new drug from first idea to U.S. approval can take up to 15 years, according to OpenAI, and every month shaved off the timeline is a month earlier that a treatment can reach the people waiting for it—and a month earlier that the developer can begin generating revenue. The process is also expensive: bringing a single approved drug to market can cost more than $2.6 billion, and fewer than 10% of candidates that enter human testing ever make it pharmacy shelves.

Beyond the science itself, OpenAI said, drug teams have to coordinate work across internal departments and outside partners, often relying on systems that do not talk to each other. Those partners usually include contract research organizations, the outside labs hired to run studies, and contract manufacturers that produce the experimental drug.

Orchestra's AI agents—software capable of monitoring tasks and flagging problems on their own—are designed to ease that burden. When setbacks occur, such as a failed manufacturing batch, the agents work out which activities and deadlines take the hit, gather the relevant information and compare possible responses. Scientists and program leaders make the final call.

Founded in the fall of 2022, Orchestra raised its seed round from Andreessen Horowitz, Definition Capital, Insight Partners and 8VC, collecting about $20 million in total, according to Caplight data. The company should not be confused with Orchestra BioMed, an unrelated Nasdaq-listed medical device maker that trades under the ticker OBIO.

The deal builds on OpenAI's push into the life sciences. In April, the company launched GPT-Rosalind, a model built specifically for biology and drug discovery, and restricted it to vetted U.S. enterprise customers such as Amgen and Moderna. A companion product, Rosalind Workbench, connects the model to scientific tools and data so researchers can analyze results and plan experiments.

The two businesses are meant to complement each other. Rosalind helps scientists figure out what to test; Orchestra is intended to handle what comes after. OpenAI said the combined team will build agents that connect scientific findings with the decisions and follow-up studies needed to turn a promising result into an actual medicine.

OpenAI has moved quickly in health and science this year. In January alone, it launched ChatGPT Health, which lets users connect their medical records to the chatbot, and bought records startup Torch for a reported $100 million to build it out. That same month, it turned another acquisition, a scientific writing tool called Crixet, into its Prism platform for researchers. With Orchestra headed into Rosalind, that makes three startups OpenAI has brought into its health and science products this year, following Torch and Crixet.

The company has also been open about wanting more than subscription fees from science. In a January blog post, CFO Sarah Friar wrote that as AI moves into drug discovery and similar fields, licensing, IP-based agreements and outcome-based pricing will share in the value created—in effect, OpenAI would like a share of the upside if its tools help produce a blockbuster.

Anthropic, OpenAI's closest rival, has been running the same play as the two labs race to own the workflow behind new medicines. Anthropic bought AI biotech startup Coefficient Bio for roughly $400 million in April and launched a research platform called Claude Science in June. In September, Anthropic said its Claude model helped uncover a previously unknown enzyme system resembling CRISPR, the gene-editing tool, though some scientists called the finding overblown.

OpenAI's previous Rosalind announcement came just five days before the Orchestra deal, when it offered eligible U.S. university labs up to 30 free seats for as long as 12 months through a new Rosalind Academic Plan.