Antiverse secures £3.5m to advance AI-driven antibody design platform
The Cardiff-based antibody design company Antiverse has secured £3.5 million in additional seed funding, bringing their total equity financing to £7.2 million. The investment round, spearheaded by i&i Biotech Fund I and Kadmos Capital, saw participation from existing investors including InnoSpark Ventures, UKI2S, Tensor Ventures, and AngelHub.
At the heart of Antiverse’s innovation is their machine learning-centred approach to antibody design, specifically targeting traditionally challenging molecules such as G-protein-coupled receptors (GPCRs) and ion channels. The platform employs ‘target-specific libraries’, utilising structural and sequence data to generate highly focused antibody libraries with enhanced predictive accuracy compared to conventional methods.
Strategic expansion
The fresh capital injection will facilitate the expansion of both laboratory and machine learning capabilities, with particular emphasis on internal asset development targeting GPCRs and ion channels. The company has already established new facilities in Boston, Massachusetts, and Prague, Czech Republic, signalling a significant scaling of operations.
Clinical significance
The development holds particular relevance for the pharmaceutical industry, as GPCRs represent targets for approximately one-third of FDA-approved drugs. Despite this significance and substantial research investment, successful GPCR-targeting antibodies remain scarce. Antiverse’s platform aims to address this gap by accelerating the antibody discovery
process to a six-month timeframe.
Murat Tunaboylu, Co-Founder and CEO of Antiverse, highlighted this challenge, stating: “A third of all FDA-approved drugs target GPCRs, yet, despite decades of research and billions of funding, only a few GPCR-targeting antibodies exist. Thanks to the support of our investors, we are one step closer to making GPCRs and other challenging targets druggable, bringing needed therapies to patients across the globe.”
Future developments
The funding will support several key initiatives, including:
• Enhancement of the platform’s predictive accuracy through improved training data curation
• Expansion of pharmaceutical and biotech collaborations
• Progression of internal therapeutic candidates towards clinical trials
• Strengthening of the company’s technical teams
The investment has garnered support from industry leaders, with Jaromir Zahradka, CEO at i&i Bio, noting Antiverse’s “significant progress in the field of antibody design”. John Gebeily, Operating Partner at Kadmos Capital, emphasised the platform’s potential to “significantly accelerate the development of life-saving treatments”.
This latest funding round positions Antiverse to advance its mission of expanding the druggable target space, potentially opening new therapeutic avenues for previously challenging molecular targets.
Murat Tunaboylu, Co-Founder and CEO of Antiverse
