Cellares announced that ARK Invest has joined its Series D financing with a $20 million investment, bringing the total round to $277 million. The funding round includes a number of major institutional investors across public and private markets, including BlackRock, Eclipse, T. Rowe Price Investment Management, Baillie Gifford, Duquesne Family Office, Intuitive Ventures, EDBI, Gates Frontier, DC Global Ventures, DFJ Growth, and Willett Advisors.
The investment comes as Cellares advances its mission to automate cell therapy manufacturing through its Integrated Development and Manufacturing Organization (IDMO) model. The company recently achieved several milestones, including manufacturing and delivering its first Good Manufacturing Practice (GMP) cell therapy doses to patients using its Cell Shuttle platform and securing long-term commercial agreements with major biopharmaceutical companies.
According to Cathie Wood, Founder, CEO, and CIO of ARK Invest, the key challenge facing the cell therapy industry is not scientific validation but scaling manufacturing efficiently and affordably. Wood noted that Cellares combines robotics, software, and biotechnology to industrialize cell therapy production, positioning the company as a disruptive innovation platform aligned with the goals of the ARK Venture Fund.
Ovid Amadi, Ph.D., Multiomics Portfolio Manager and Director of Research at ARK Invest, highlighted the complexity of consistently manufacturing personalized therapies under GMP conditions. He said Cellares’ vertically integrated IDMO model has demonstrated both technical and commercial validation across numerous manufacturing processes, commercial partnerships, and clinical applications. Amadi pointed to agreements with Bristol Myers Squibb and Cabaletta Bio, along with the successful infusion of patients using therapies manufactured on the Cell Shuttle platform, as evidence that the company’s technology has moved beyond proof of concept.
The company recently reached a major clinical milestone by manufacturing and delivering the first two GMP doses of rese-cel, an investigational CAR T cell therapy being developed by Cabaletta Bio. Both doses met release specifications and were infused into patients on schedule. Shortly afterward, Cabaletta Bio signed a 10-year commercial supply agreement with Cellares to support future manufacturing needs.
These developments build on Cellares’ previously announced $380 million global manufacturing agreement with Bristol Myers Squibb, which reserves commercial-scale manufacturing capacity across facilities in the United States, Europe, and Japan for the pharmaceutical company’s cell therapy programs.
Cellares currently operates IDMO Smart Factories in South San Francisco, California, and Bridgewater, New Jersey, while additional facilities are under development in Leiden, Netherlands, and Kashiwa City, Japan. The company expects its global manufacturing network to support commercial-scale production for hundreds of thousands of patients annually beginning in 2027.
Founded to modernize the manufacturing of cell therapies, Cellares has developed two core automated platforms: Cell Shuttle for end-to-end cell therapy manufacturing and Cell Q for automated quality control. The company says its technology can produce up to ten times more cell therapy batches than conventional contract development and manufacturing organizations while reducing costs and improving process reliability.
The Cell Shuttle platform became the first cell therapy manufacturing system to receive the FDA’s Advanced Manufacturing Technology designation. Cellares also reports a 100% automation success rate across more than a dozen automated manufacturing processes and has successfully transitioned from a development-stage technology provider to a clinically validated manufacturing infrastructure company.
KEY QUOTES:
“The science behind cell therapy is proven. The challenge now is manufacturing these life-saving treatments at the scale and cost required to meet patient demand. Cellares sits at the convergence of robotics, software, and biotechnology, bringing the automation needed to transform cell therapy manufacturing from a bespoke process into an industrial-scale platform. We believe this type of infrastructure will be essential as next-generation therapies move into the mainstream, making Cellares exactly the kind of disruptive innovation platform the ARK Venture Fund was created to support.”
Cathie Wood, Founder, CEO, and CIO, ARK Invest
“Consistently manufacturing living, patient-specific therapies under GMP conditions is one of the hardest challenges at the frontier of modern medicine, and it cannot be solved by manual manufacturing methods. To solve this problem well, Cellares created a new type of vertically integrated company, the IDMO, which is integrating and displacing three different types of companies: tools developers, siloed automation companies, and manual CDMOs. From a research standpoint, what convinced us is that Cellares’ entire capability stack has been validated technically across a dozen different processes and commercially, with two significant commercial supply agreements with BMS and Cabaletta. And most importantly, the infusion of the first two patients with a Cellares manufactured product in April of this year confirmed that the technical and commercial promise had translated into a clinical product.”
Ovid Amadi, PhD, Multiomics Portfolio Manager and Director of Research, ARK Invest
“We have manufactured cell therapies on the Cell Shuttle and delivered doses to patients on schedule. That is the proof the field has been waiting for. The question was never whether automated manufacturing could work, but whether it could work at commercial scale and at a cost that unlocks access for all the patients in need. That is what this capital builds toward as our global network of IDMO Smart Factories comes online in 2027.”
Fabian Gerlinghaus, Co-Founder and CEO, Cellares
