Tamarind Bio: Scaling AI Inference for Drug Discovery at Industrial Scale

Tamarind Bio, founded by Deniz and Sherry, provides an inference‑as‑a‑service platform tailored for AI‑driven drug discovery. The company’s library includes leading open‑source models such as AlphaFold, enabling biopharmaceutical teams to design new medicines purely through computational workflows. The platform evolved from a personal initiative born out of a Stanford laboratory’s need to run extensive model pipelines. Initially, a graduate student would receive requests for up to five sequential models, process tens of thousands of inputs on a university cluster, and then email results back. As workflows grew more complex, the burden on individual researchers became untenable, prompting the creation of Tamarind as a centralized, scalable solution that removes the technical barrier for non‑software scientists. Today, Tamarind’s user base spans more than 20 major pharmaceutical companies, numerous biotech startups, and tens of thousands of scientists across the globe. The company’s success demonstrates that even in data‑driven fields dominated by internal infrastructure, a dedicated inference provider can deliver significant efficiency gains. Key differentiators of Tamarind include a dual‑interface design: a programmatic API for developers and a scientist‑friendly web application for end‑users. The platform eliminates the usual friction associated with onboarding Docker containers and managing GPU resources, allowing researchers to focus on discovery rather than infrastructure. Additionally, the company’s standardized data schemas enable easy interchange of model outputs, while a custom scheduler and queue system optimizes horizontal scaling across CPU and GPU nodes—crucial for inference jobs that can span minutes to hours. Beyond model hosting, Tamarind has expanded to support fine‑tuning, custom UI development for arbitrary Docker containers, and integration with wet‑lab data sources. These extensions allow users to construct reproducible, end‑to‑end pipelines that replace physical experiments with computational protocols. As demand for such pipelines grows—especially for tasks like protein generation—the platform’s modular architecture ensures seamless orchestration of multiple models. Tamarind’s mission is to accelerate the development of therapeutics by democratizing access to advanced AI inference. Interested parties can explore the platform at https://app.tamarind.bio, reach out for collaboration or employment opportunities, and provide feedback to help shape the future of AI in biopharma.