Neil Patil

Neil Patil is Chai Discovery’s product lead, working on tools for AI-assisted medicine design. On his personal website, he describes his remit as leading product and platform engineering: Chai builds models such as Chai-2 that design new medicines, alongside the integrated development environment scientists use to design them. He describes the ambition as making biology programmable.[1][2]

In his August 11, 2026 Latent Space appearance with Chai cofounder Matthew McPartlon, Patil described close work with pharmaceutical partners as a way to identify useful research problems. Their requests help the team choose work grounded in scientists’ needs: “we're able to do informed research based on what our partners have just been organically asking us for help with.”[1]

The scientist-facing software is part of that product remit. In the accompanying episode essay, RJ Honicky described Chai’s molecule editor as closer to a CAD or graphics-design program than a chatbot—a visual workspace for molecular design.[2][1]

Before moving into medicine-design tools, Patil worked in cybersecurity. He says he joined Vanta as its fifth engineer, spent his first two years automating security compliance, and then moved into product to build new product lines. After Vanta and before Chai, he cofounded a supply-chain security company.[2]

At Vanta, Patil was a Senior Product Manager and coauthored the Vendor Risk Management launch announcement with Senior Product Marketing Manager Pranav Deshpande. The product extended automation into third-party security reviews: integrations discovered applications used across an organization, including unapproved vendors; a configurable rubric assessed risk using access to sensitive data and infrastructure, business criticality, and other signals; and a centralized workspace tracked reviews and automated requests for vendors’ security documentation.[4]

During a 2019 robotics engineering internship at Ike Robotics, Patil built and operationalized the company’s camera-calibration stack and improved its localization-evaluation infrastructure, according to his résumé.[3]