Parallel Bio, a company pioneering human-first drug discovery, announced it has raised $21 million in Series A funding, led by AIX Ventures. The funding round attracted prominent leaders in AI and biotech, including new investors Amplo and Marc Benioff, founder and CEO of Salesforce, as well as existing investors Metaplanet, Humba Ventures, Atypical Ventures, Undeterred Capital, and Jeff Dean.
The company also revealed that eight pharmaceutical partners, including three Fortune 500 companies, are testing over 50 drugs and immunotherapies using its organoid-based immune system platform. Notably, Centivax has completed the first preclinical testing on the platform for its universal flu vaccine candidate.
Parallel Bio’s platform combines lymph-node organoids with AI and robotics to replicate the human immune system at scale across diverse populations. And Organoids are 3D and self-assembling models of human biology. These mini organs mimic an organ’s structure and function and the body’s response to disease or treatment, as if the organoids were individual patients.
Partnership with Centivax: Parallel Bio partnered with Centivax, a biotechnology company specializing in universal immunity, to generate human-first data to validate Centivax’s first program: a universal flu vaccine called Centi-Flu. This vaccine is now in manufacturing for human clinical trials, with the first patient expected to be dosed early next year.
Organoid study: The organoid study revealed the power of the Centi-Flu technology, as it effectively targets common features of the virus shared by many different influenza strains, producing strong immune responses against strains not included in the vaccine. Human immune organoids were “vaccinated” with Centi-Flu, leading to the production of B cells capable of reacting to a wide variety of flu strains. The immune organoids were derived from patients with prior flu exposure, proving that Centi-Flu could trigger broad humoral responses in flu-exposed individuals.
The organoid model also showed activation of CD4+ and CD8+ T cells, which are important for fighting infections, suggesting that Centi-Flu helps stimulate both antibody production and T cell immunity. This combination is especially valuable for protecting against severe flu, including hospitalization and death.
How the funding will be used: Parallel Bio will utilize the new funding round to scale the AI and automation capabilities of its organoid-based immune system platform, expand its team of scientists and engineers, and support the growth of its pharmaceutical partnerships. And to date, Parallel Bio has raised a total of nearly $30 million, including this Series A and previous seed rounds.
KEY QUOTES:
“With these milestones, we are closer to making human-first drug discovery the new industry standard. For too long, the reliance on lab mice to model human biology has come at a high cost: 95% of drugs fail in human trials even after succeeding in animal studies. We’re turning that on its head by using organoids and AI to discover drugs in true-to-life human models from the start.”
Robert DiFazio, CEO and co-founder at Parallel Bio
“Parallel Bio is redefining drug development by turning the conventional model upside down—transforming today’s 95% failure rate into a pathway for 95% success. Their groundbreaking human-first platform unlocks biological insights previously impossible to capture, accelerating the development of effective treatments that reach patients faster while generating de novo biological data to power the next generation of AI-driven therapeutics. We’re thrilled to partner with the Parallel Bio team in setting a new gold standard for the future of medicine.”
AIX Ventures partner Krish Ramadurai, who joined the company’s board of directors as part of the round
“Starting with human models enables new drugs to reach the market at a pace never possible before. We aim to slash $2 billion and 9 years from each drug candidate in development by predicting success at the earliest stages of discovery.”
Juliana Hilliard, Parallel Bio co-founder and chief scientific officer
“Parallel Bio enables us to derisk the single biggest source of failure in vaccine development: making sure the vaccines work in humans before the human trials have even begun. Even though we have validated our pan-influenza responses in mice, rats, pigs, and ferrets, ultimately we are making a universal vaccine for humans. Parallel Bio’s platform is transformative by allowing us to directly validate our results in immune organoids derived from adult humans.”
Jacob Glanville, president and CEO at Centivax
