Turbine, a virtual biology company focused on AI-powered drug discovery, announced it has raised $25 million in a Series B financing round led by Interactive Venture Partners, with participation from Beiersdorf AG and existing investors including MSD Global Health Innovation, Accel, and Mercia. The company also unveiled its first immunology-focused partnership with a top 10 pharmaceutical company as it broadens its platform beyond oncology.
The new funding will support the expansion of Turbine’s virtual cell platform to cover additional assays across discovery and translational medicine. Through its lab-in-the-loop approach, the company generates proprietary perturbation datasets to refine its foundational virtual cell model across new assay and tissue types. These capabilities are delivered via Turbine’s Virtual Lab, a no-code platform that integrates directly with pharmaceutical workflows and systems.
Alongside the financing, Turbine is expanding its biopharma focus into immunology through a newly announced collaboration with a top 10 pharma company. Under the agreement, Turbine will train its virtual assays to model immune cell behavior using proprietary datasets supplied by its partner. The collaboration aims to generate mechanistic insights into immune pathways to help identify and prioritize novel therapeutic combinations. By enabling large-scale in silico experimentation within the Virtual Lab, the companies intend to ensure that only the highest-conviction hypotheses proceed to wet-lab validation.
Turbine said its technology allows researchers to run experiments at computational speed and scale, testing millions of hypotheses beyond traditional laboratory constraints. The company has worked with scientists at major biopharma organizations such as MSD (Merck & Co.), AstraZeneca, and Bayer, and reports that its virtual assays have supported more than 30 discovery programs to date.
Founded to accelerate drug discovery and improve clinical translatability, Turbine is backed by technology and life sciences investors including Accel, MSD Global Health Innovation Fund, Interactive Venture Partners and Beiersdorf.
Beiersdorf, headquartered in Hamburg, Germany, is a global skin care company with brands including NIVEA, Eucerin and La Prairie. Interactive Venture Partners is a US-based investment fund affiliated with the Interactive Brokers Group of Companies and supported by the Thomas Peterffy family office.
KEY QUOTES:
“Central and Eastern Europe has produced exceptional innovation, and Turbine stands out as one of the region’s most compelling virtual biology platforms. Our team assessed the opportunity from both a technology and life sciences perspective, and we believe the ambitious team’s unique capability to virtualize biological experiments with AI positions them to be among the global leaders embedding such technology into biopharma R&D,”
Laszlo Czirjak, Managing Partner at Interactive VP
“At Beiersdorf Venture Capital we see clear potential in AI-driven technologies such as virtual cell models that help researchers assess how active ingredients interact with skin biology, skin conditions, and safety. Our investment in Turbine reflects our interest in deep-tech approaches that could shape the future of skin research.”
Ascan Voswinckel, Head of Beiersdorf Venture Capital
“Combination therapies have been proven to offer patient benefit. However, given the complexity of immunological diseases and the sheer number of potential combinations, virtualization is the only way scientists can rationally explore and identify the right drug combinations, as well as which patient cohorts may benefit from them. We are excited to expand into immunology, as a new therapeutic area, to build an active learning loop where simulations inform the right wet lab experiments, which in turn generate data that improves the next round of predictions to ultimately identify a number of potentially successful immunology drug combinations.”
Szabolcs Nagy, Co-Founder & CEO at Turbine
