Antiverse, an AI-driven techbio company specializing in de novo antibody design for challenging drug targets, has raised $9.3 million in Series A financing to accelerate the development of therapeutic antibodies aimed at historically undruggable disease targets. The round was led by Soulmates Ventures with participation from Innovation Investment Capital, DOMiNO Ventures, and existing investors DBW, Kadmos Capital, and i&i Biotech Fund, bringing the company’s total funding to more than $20 million since inception.
The new capital will be used to expand Antiverse’s proprietary AI antibody design platform, advance its internal therapeutic pipeline, and move lead antibody programs toward in vivo efficacy studies. The company will also continue scaling pharmaceutical and research collaborations.
In conjunction with the financing, Antiverse announced a research agreement with the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation to design novel antibodies targeting the extracellular region of the cystic fibrosis transmembrane conductance regulator protein, a target that has remained difficult to address using conventional antibody discovery approaches.
Cystic fibrosis is caused by mutations in the CFTR gene that disrupt chloride transport, leading to thick mucus buildup that damages the lungs, pancreas, and other organs. The extracellular portion of the CFTR protein has been particularly challenging to target with antibodies, necessitating improved research tools to enable new therapeutic strategies.
Under the agreement, Antiverse will deploy its AI-driven modeling and optimization platform to design antibodies against the extracellular region of CFTR. The candidates will be screened and validated through the company’s lab-in-the-loop workflow, including hyper-expressing cell-line testing, before being transferred to the Foundation’s laboratory for testing in natively expressing cell models. The collaboration is intended to support rapid evaluation of emerging therapeutic modalities and accelerate the progression from early discovery to potential patient applications.
Antiverse said its platform has been built on seven years of training generative models on difficult targets, enabling the design of epitope-specific antibodies while optimizing key physicochemical properties and humanness. The company combines computational design with programmable cell-line engineering and in-house laboratory validation to create an iterative workflow spanning design, build and testing.
The company has secured partnership agreements with multiple top-20 global pharmaceutical companies and aims to progress its first wholly owned candidates into later-stage preclinical development by 2027 while continuing to support partner antibody discovery programs.
KEY QUOTES
“Many biologically important targets have remained difficult to drug using conventional antibody discovery methods. This Series A financing enables us to scale our generative antibody design platform, accelerate our internal pipeline, and expand strategic collaborations such as our work with the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation, where our technology is applied to explore challenging targets like extracellular CFTR. Together, these efforts help inform future research efforts and allow Antiverse to continue advancing our own therapeutic programs for patients.”
Murat Tunaboylu, Co-Founder and CEO, Antiverse
“Antiverse is tackling one of the most technically demanding problems in drug discovery. The team’s ability to reduce the development time for de novo therapeutic-grade antibodies in a defined domain to under four months is a significant scientific and operational achievement. This capability, combined with the AI-driven design and in-house labs, positions Antiverse on track to become a global leader and the go-to developer of antibody therapies for the most elusive disease targets in medicine.”
Michal Sikyta, Managing Partner at Soulmates Ventures
