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Drug discovery on Bittensor is moving one step closer to the physical world.
Metanova, a biotech-focused project building on Bittensor as Subnet 68, announced a new partnership with ONEPOT.AI, an AI-driven robotic synthesis lab designed to dramatically reduce one of the pharmaceutical industry’s biggest bottlenecks: chemical synthesis.
The collaboration will allow compounds identified through Metanova’s screening systems and algorithms on Subnet 68 to be synthesized and delivered in as little as five to seven business days. Traditionally, validating promising compounds can take months due to synthesis constraints.
Bringing Bittensor Drug Discovery Into the Lab
Metanova is working to improve early-stage drug candidate selection, helping researchers identify promising compounds faster and more efficiently during the research and development process. Instead of relying on centralized compute and proprietary systems, building on Bittensor enables distributed networks of participants to compete and contribute intelligence through crypto-native incentive mechanisms.
Metanova’s incentive structure focuses on three core areas of drug research: small molecule discovery, nanobody design, and algorithmic exploration across chemical space.
In practice, this means researchers and models within the subnet are rewarded for generating higher-quality predictions and discoveries that could improve the odds of identifying viable therapeutic candidates earlier in the pipeline.
However, identifying a promising molecule computationally is only part of the challenge.
Before any candidate can progress further, it must be physically synthesized and validated in the real world—a process that has historically slowed drug development timelines.
That is where ONEPOT.AI enters the picture.
Solving the Synthesis Bottleneck
ONEPOT.AI operates an AI-powered robotic synthesis laboratory capable of producing novel small molecules from its growing CORE molecular collection.
According to Metanova's announcement, the partnership enables candidate compounds discovered through NOVA’s screening systems to move from virtual prediction to physical synthesis far faster than traditional workflows, reducing turnaround times from months to less than a week.
ONEPOT.AI, founded by Daniil Boiko and Andrei Tyrin, has raised $13 million from investors including Fifty Years, Khosla Ventures, Speedinvest, Norrsken VC, and Script Capital. The company has also received backing from several prominent AI and technology leaders, including OpenAI co-founder Wojciech Zaremba and Google Chief Scientist Jeff Dean.
For Metanova, this new infrastructure layer may significantly improve R&D velocity by enabling faster feedback loops between computational discovery and experimental validation.
Instead of waiting months to determine whether an AI-predicted molecule performs as expected in physical testing, researchers could iterate much faster.
Toward an Autonomous Drug Discovery Loop
Beyond accelerating internal research, Metanova says the partnership also opens a new service layer for external collaborators.
Partners will now be able to access decentralized virtual screening and robotic synthesis as a coordinated offering, effectively combining Bittensor-powered computational discovery with automated laboratory execution.
The announcement also points toward a broader ambition of building what Metanova describes as a “fully agentic discovery loop,” where AI systems can identify promising compounds, trigger synthesis, validate results, and continuously refine future searches with minimal human intervention.
For the Bittensor ecosystem, the partnership represents another notable example of subnet-generated intelligence producing tangible outputs beyond crypto-native use cases. In this case, intelligence generated through SN68 may now help move potential drug candidates from algorithms to physical compounds faster than ever before.
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