Waypoint Bio, an AI-native biotechnology company focused on developing next-generation CAR T therapies for solid tumors using spatial biology and artificial intelligence, announced the closing of a $20 million Series A financing round. The funding round was led by Amplify Partners. Additional participation came from General Catalyst, Time BioVentures, Mitsui Global Investments, Lux Capital, and existing investor Hummingbird Ventures. As part of the financing, Amplify Partners Partner Elliot Hershberg will join Waypoint Bio’s board of directors.
The company plans to use the proceeds to advance its lead program, WAY-103, into an investigator-initiated clinical trial expected to begin in late 2026. The funding will also support the expansion of Waypoint’s AI and spatial biology platform as well as the development of its clinical capabilities.
Waypoint Bio also announced key additions to its leadership team. Dr. Patrick Kaifosh, previously co-founder and Chief Scientific Officer of CTRL-Labs and a Senior Director at Meta Reality Labs, has joined the company as Chief Technology Officer. In addition, Dr. Kristen Hege, former Senior Vice President of Early Clinical Development, Hematology/Oncology & Cell Therapy at Bristol-Myers Squibb, has joined Waypoint’s Scientific Advisory Board.
The company is developing in vivo CAR T therapies through a platform that combines artificial intelligence, computer vision, and spatial pooled screening. Its lead candidate, WAY-103, targets gastric and pancreatic solid tumors. According to the company, the program demonstrated more than 15-fold greater potency in animal models compared with multiple clinical benchmarks while also reducing on-target and off-tumor toxicity.
Waypoint’s discovery platform evaluates therapeutic candidates through pooled screening methods that analyze how treatments interact with the tumor microenvironment. The company believes this approach helps identify promising therapies before advancing them into costly clinical development while simultaneously generating data that can improve future AI models.
In addition to WAY-103, the company is advancing WAY-200, a colorectal cancer program, toward clinical development. Waypoint is also building a broader pipeline of in vivo CAR T therapies for other solid tumors and developing proprietary next-generation lentiviral vectors designed to improve in vivo delivery.
The company expects its lead in vivo CAR T program, paired with its proprietary lentiviral vector technology, to enter clinical testing in China in late 2026.
KEY QUOTES:
“AI is incredibly powerful at exploring complicated search spaces, but predictions are easy, actual rigorous validation is limiting. What matters now is knowing which ideas translate to human biology and clinical success. We built Waypoint to design therapeutic candidates with AI, evaluate them with spatially informed screening, and advance multiple of the strongest programs rapidly into the clinic. Our goal is not to produce more preclinical hits that look good in mice. It’s to also leverage capital efficient first-in-human studies to produce differentiated medicines that can lead their categories.”
Xinchen Wang, Co-Founder and CEO, Waypoint Bio
“Spatial biology has really picked up over the past few years because you can finally measure how your therapeutic candidates affect different local environments and cell-cell interactions. This is critical for most complex diseases and especially solid tumors, where immunosuppressive signaling and infiltration barriers can’t be captured by simple readouts like tumor size and we have a way to screen at-scale for these spatial phenotypes. We’re solving not only for the T cell biology, but also interactions within the tumor microenvironment, and how the in vivo delivery vector affects all of this.”
David Phizicky, Co-Founder and CSO, Waypoint Bio
“As AI models become better at generating ideas, the scarce resource is experimental systems that tell you which designs actually matter. Waypoint combines AI-generated assets with spatially resolved in vivo evaluation and a path to rapid clinical readouts. We think that combination compounds over time.”
Elliot Hershberg, Partner, Amplify Partners
