Avenue Biosciences has secured $5.7 million in a seed extension round to advance its protein engineering technology. The funding was co-led by Balnord and Tesi, with continued backing from Voima Ventures, Inventure, University of Helsinki, and Dimerent. This brings the Palo Alto-based company's total capital raised to $8.7 million since its founding in 2024.
The biotechnology firm focuses on a critical challenge in therapeutic protein production: the secretory pathway. This cellular machinery is responsible for folding, modifying, and secreting proteins used in treatments ranging from cancer therapies to vaccines.
Current industry practices for therapeutic protein development rely on a limited set of signal peptides that have been used for decades. Avenue Biosciences takes a different approach by testing thousands of naturally occurring and engineered signal peptide variants. These molecular sequences play a key role in how efficiently proteins are produced and processed within cells.
"The secretory pathway is one of the remaining black boxes in therapeutic protein production. Despite its importance, the current industry standard relies heavily on a decades-old playbook, testing only a small set of safe signal peptides rather than exploring thousands of sequence variants. Our technology makes the increasingly complex proteins, such as AI-designed proteins or multispecifics, more manufacturable, improving access to lifesaving therapies," comments Tero-Pekka Alastalo, CEO and co-founder of Avenue Biosciences.
The company's platform generates thousands of protein variants, testing which combinations of signal peptides and therapeutic proteins produce the best results in terms of yield and quality.
Modern biologics are becoming more sophisticated. Many new drugs are designed to perform multiple functions simultaneously—directing immune cells to specific locations, activating them, and recognizing diseased cells with precision. This complexity, while beneficial for patients, creates significant manufacturing challenges.
"Novel protein-based biologics under development for example in cancer, rare diseases or immunology, are becoming increasingly targeted and effective, performing several functions with one therapeutic component: Bring immune cells to the right place, activate them, and recognize disease cells more specifically. However, this adds complexity to the protein structure, adding manufacturing cost, or in the worst case, preventing the development completely," comments COO, co-founder and Helsinki laboratory site lead Katja Rosti.
Avenue's technology addresses this by optimizing the signal peptides used during production. Because these peptides are removed from the final therapeutic protein, the target molecule remains unchanged. This makes the approach particularly useful for biosimilar manufacturing, where companies produce lower-cost versions of existing treatments.
The new capital will be used to scale Avenue's high-throughput platform and expand its partnerships with pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies. The technology has already attracted several industry clients who are testing it for their therapeutic development programs.
The company views its R&D investments as directly tied to commercial growth. Developing the platform will enable Avenue to handle larger volumes of projects and collaborate across a broader range of therapy types. The funding will also support hiring new machine learning experts and building internal tools that create predictive models from the company's proprietary datasets.
Avenue is building proprietary datasets that show how specific signal peptides affect different protein targets. This information feeds into machine learning models that can predict optimal manufacturing conditions for new therapeutic candidates.
Avenue Biosciences emerged from research conducted at the University of Helsinki's Ville Paavilainen laboratory. The company operates as a transatlantic organization with facilities in both Palo Alto, California, and Helsinki, Finland.
The founding team's collaboration traces back over 15 years. CEO Tero-Pekka Alastalo first met Ville Paavilainen during their post-doctoral work at Stanford and UCSF. Katja Rosti, one of the technology co-inventors, worked in Paavilainen's research group before co-founding the company. Today, Rosti and Alastalo lead Avenue Biosciences as a transatlantic venture, while Paavilainen continues his structural biology research at the University of Helsinki.
The founding team combined expertise in cellular biology with computational approaches to create a platform that bridges wet lab experimentation and AI-driven predictions. Their work focuses on protein biogenesis in the secretory pathway, an area that has received less attention than other aspects of drug development despite its impact on manufacturing success.
The company's technology has potential applications across multiple therapeutic areas including oncology, infectious diseases, immunology, and rare diseases. It can be applied to various protein-based treatments such as antibodies, vaccines, gene therapies, and proteins designed using artificial intelligence.
"Avenue's technology taps into some of the largest opportunities in biotech right now: it significantly lowers the costs of biologics and transforms therapeutic protein manufacturing with the use of AI. Their combination of wet lab and machine learning enables the development of high-quality prediction tools for therapeutic developers, targeting the biggest bottlenecks in the industry. The team has shown incredible execution, with really strong industry names as their clients," comments Gabriele Poteliunaite, Investor at Balnord.
"Many life-altering therapeutic innovations remain out of reach for most of the global population. We see significant growth opportunities for Avenue's technology, which is deeply rooted in Finnish scientific discovery, and has the potential to become a gold standard in its field," comments Investment Director Miia Kaye from Tesi.
The investors backing Avenue Biosciences include Balnord and Tesi as co-leads in this round, with participation from Voima Ventures, Inventure, University of Helsinki, and Dimerent.
