Antiverse, an AI-driven biotech company, has closed a $9.3 million Series A financing round. The round was led by Soulmates Ventures, with participation from Innovation Investment Capital, DOMiNO Ventures, and existing investors DBW, Kadmos Capital, and i&i Biotech Fund. The company has now raised more than $20 million in total since it was founded.
The new capital will be used to expand Antiverse's proprietary AI antibody design platform, accelerate its internal therapeutic pipeline, and push lead antibody programs toward in vivo efficacy studies. The company also plans to continue building pharmaceutical and research partnerships.
Alongside the funding announcement, Antiverse has entered into a research agreement with the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation. The collaboration focuses on designing novel antibodies targeting the extracellular region of the cystic fibrosis transmembrane conductance regulator protein, known as CFTR. This specific part of the protein has long resisted conventional antibody discovery methods, making it one of the more stubborn open problems in cystic fibrosis research.
Cystic fibrosis is a genetic disease caused by mutations in the CFTR gene. Those mutations disrupt chloride transport in the body, causing thick mucus to accumulate and damage the lungs, pancreas, and other organs. Better antibody tools targeting the CFTR protein could open doors to new therapeutic approaches that current technology has not been able to reach.
Under the research agreement, Antiverse will apply its AI-driven modelling and optimisation platform to design antibody candidates against extracellular CFTR. Those candidates will then be screened and validated through the company's lab-in-the-loop workflow, which includes hyper-expressing cell-line testing, before being transferred to the Foundation's dedicated lab for testing in natively-expressing cell models.
The goal is to move faster from early discovery to patients by supporting the evaluation of emerging therapeutic approaches against a target that has historically been difficult to address. As Murat Tunaboylu, Co-Founder and CEO of Antiverse, put it: "Many biologically important targets have remained difficult to drug using conventional antibody discovery methods. This Series A financing enables us to scale our generative antibody design platform, accelerate our internal pipeline, and expand strategic collaborations such as our work with the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation."
Antiverse has spent seven years training generative models on difficult drug targets, including G-protein coupled receptors and ion channels. These are the kinds of proteins that most antibody discovery platforms struggle with. The company's platform is built to design epitope-specific antibodies while optimising physicochemical properties and humanness, allowing the team to move from target identification to functional antibodies in a defined domain in under four months.
That speed is not trivial. In drug discovery, compressing timelines by months can meaningfully change what is commercially and scientifically viable. The platform combines AI-driven design with proprietary programmable cell-line engineering and in-house laboratory validation, creating an end-to-end workflow that reduces the back-and-forth typically required between computational and wet lab teams.
Antiverse supports a range of collaboration models, giving pharmaceutical, biotech, and foundation partners the flexibility to tailor programs to their specific scientific and strategic needs. The company has already secured partnership agreements with multiple top-20 global pharmaceutical companies.
Founded and headquartered in Cardiff, UK, with offices in Boston and Prague, Antiverse combines proprietary datasets, advanced machine learning techniques, and programmable cell-line engineering. The company was built around a core thesis: that the most medically important targets are often the ones that existing tools cannot handle, and that a purpose-built AI platform is the most reliable way to address them.
Michal Sikyta, Managing Partner at Soulmates Ventures, explained the firm's rationale for leading the round: "Antiverse is tackling one of the most technically demanding problems in drug discovery. The team's ability to reduce the development time for de novo therapeutic-grade antibodies in a defined domain to under four months is a significant scientific and operational achievement."
Looking ahead, Antiverse aims to progress its first wholly owned candidates into later-stage preclinical development by 2027, while continuing to support pharmaceutical partners with antibody discovery programs. The CF Foundation collaboration marks another step in validating the platform across different disease areas and partner types.
