Scala Biodesign announced it has raised $16 million in a Series A financing round, bringing its total funding to $21.5 million since its founding in 2022. The round was led by Grove Ventures, with participation from TLV Partners, Deep Insight, the Israel Innovation Authority, and other investors.
The funding will support global expansion of ScalaOS, the company’s AI-driven protein design platform, and further development of its computational architecture for optimizing proteins used in medicines, vaccines, and industrial applications. The company also plans to expand its engineering and scientific teams and accelerate commercial adoption.
Scala Biodesign is focused on addressing longstanding challenges in protein engineering, where traditional methods rely on iterative lab experiments that can take years and incur significant costs. Its ScalaOS platform integrates physics-based modeling, evolutionary data, and large language model-based AI to design and optimize proteins more efficiently, often in a single design cycle.
Over the past eight months, ScalaOS has been adopted by nine of the world’s top 20 pharmaceutical companies, as well as leading chemical corporations. The platform supports a wide range of applications, including antibodies, enzymes, vaccines, diagnostics, and industrial biotechnology.
The company highlighted its collaboration with Boehringer Ingelheim as an example of its impact, noting that its platform helped stabilize difficult drug targets, improve protein expression levels, and accelerate drug discovery timelines.
Founded by Dr. Ravit Netzer and Dr. Adi Goldenzweig, along with Chief Scientist Prof. Sarel Fleishman of the Weizmann Institute of Science, Scala Biodesign builds on more than a decade of protein design research across over 80 laboratories and 150 scientific publications. Its platform is designed to enable faster, more reliable protein optimization directly within R&D workflows across biopharma and industrial biotechnology.
KEY QUOTES
“Having worked closely with the industry’s most advanced R&D teams, even the most sophisticated organizations are held back by the complexity of protein engineering. Today’s researchers are often forced into years of iterative, high-failure lab experiments simply because they lack the computational bandwidth to fully predict a candidate’s potential. At Scala, we are eliminating this bottleneck. By replacing traditional trial-and-error with a scalable, AI-driven platform, we empower scientists to turn complex engineering into a predictable, high-success engine, bringing life-saving medicines to market faster than ever imagined.”
Dr. Ravit Netzer, Co-Founder And CEO, Scala Biodesign
“Scala Biodesign has been a trusted partner for us across multiple targets for more than two years. ScalaOS helps remove a critical barrier in protein work that can otherwise hold programs back, allowing teams to advance more quickly from target to downstream discovery and toward new medicines.”
Dr. Dirk Kessler, Global Head Structural Research, Boehringer Ingelheim
“Improving the speed and reliability of protein design remains one of the most impactful opportunities in biotechnology. Scala’s computational platform allows research teams to tackle protein engineering challenges earlier and more systematically within their own workflows. We believe this capability can materially accelerate development timelines across therapeutic and industrial programs.”
Renana Ashkenazi, Managing Partner, Grove Ventures
