The San Diego–based startup was co-founded in 2015 by engineering students at University of California San Diego who saw a need for 3D visualization tools to help medicinal and computational chemists and structural biologists reduce their time to market and increase the efficacy of new drugs. The company will ship virtual reality headsets to selected members of the consortium and provide access to Nanome software so that they can use it to evaluate the ability of candidate molecules to bind the viral proteins in 3D. The tool will also enable collaboration in real-time and across borders (the scientists can "meet" in virtual reality).