Waypoint Bio, a New York-based biotech company, has closed a $20 million Series A round to develop AI-designed cell therapies for solid tumors. The company was co-founded by CEO Xinchen Wang and Chief Scientific Officer David Phizicky. Its platform combines artificial intelligence, computer vision, and spatial pooled screening to discover and optimize cancer therapies, with a specific focus on solid tumors that have proven resistant to existing immunotherapy treatments.
CAR T therapy, short for chimeric antigen receptor T-cell therapy, works by engineering a patient's own immune cells to recognize and destroy cancer cells. It has delivered strong results in blood cancers like leukemia and lymphoma. Solid tumors present a harder problem. The immune cells struggle to reach the tumor, tend not to persist long enough, and face a local environment inside the tumor that actively suppresses their activity. That hostile microenvironment is not a minor technical detail. Tumor heterogeneity, immunosuppression, and safety concerns have kept CAR T therapy for solid tumors an active and largely unsolved area of clinical research.
The round was led by Amplify Partners, with partner Elliot Hershberg joining Waypoint's board of directors. General Catalyst, Time BioVentures, Mitsui Global Investments, and Lux Capital also participated. Existing investor Hummingbird Ventures contributed as well.
The global CAR T therapy market was valued at $6.1 billion in 2025 and is projected to reach $15.6 billion by 2035. Most of that growth is concentrated in blood cancers. Gastric, pancreatic, colorectal, and other solid tumors remain largely outside what approved CAR T therapies can address. The reason comes down to biology. Solid tumors are surrounded by a dense, complex microenvironment that blocks immune cells from getting in and shuts down the ones that do. Physical barriers, abnormal blood vessels, and a dense mix of immunosuppressive cells collectively make it difficult for engineered T cells to function once they arrive.
Spatial biology offers a way to study this problem more directly. Rather than measuring whether a drug kills cancer cells in a dish, spatial biology tools allow researchers to observe how a therapy interacts with the full local environment inside a tumor tissue sample, including neighboring cells, structural barriers, and signaling activity. Waypoint runs large-scale screening experiments using this approach, testing many therapeutic candidates at once and recording how each one behaves in realistic tumor conditions. The goal is to identify the most promising candidates before committing to full clinical trials, which are far more expensive and time-consuming.
"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," said David Phizicky, co-founder and CSO of Waypoint Bio. "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."
The main priority for the new capital is advancing WAY-103, Waypoint's lead program for gastric and pancreatic solid tumors, into an investigator-initiated clinical trial starting in late 2026. In animal studies, WAY-103 showed more than 15-fold greater potency than multiple clinical benchmarks, while also reducing a common side effect known as on-target/off-tumor toxicity, where the therapy affects healthy tissue that shares markers with the tumor. The therapy was identified and refined through the company's spatial screening process.
A second program, WAY-200, targeting colorectal cancer, is also being advanced toward clinical testing with this funding. Additional in vivo CAR T constructs for other solid tumors are in earlier development. The round will also support the buildout of proprietary lentiviral vectors, the biological delivery vehicles used to introduce the CAR gene into T cells. Waypoint is developing its own vectors, which it says outperform existing delivery systems.
"As AI models become better at generating ideas, the scarce resource is experimental systems that tell you which designs actually matter," said Elliot Hershberg, Partner at Amplify Partners. "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."
Waypoint Bio is based in New York and is building toward first-in-human clinical studies for multiple programs. The company uses three interconnected tools: AI to generate and refine therapeutic designs, computer vision to analyze spatial data from screening experiments, and pooled in vivo screening to evaluate how candidates perform in conditions that resemble an actual tumor environment. Running many experiments in parallel allows the team to compare candidates against each other directly, rather than testing them one at a time.
Two recent leadership additions strengthen the company's technical depth. Dr. Patrick Kaifosh, previously co-founder and Chief Scientific Officer of neuro-AI startup CTRL-Labs and Senior Director at Meta's Reality Labs, has joined as Chief Technology Officer. Dr. Kristen Hege, formerly Senior Vice President, Early Clinical Development, Hematology/Oncology & Cell Therapy at Bristol-Myers Squibb, has joined the Scientific Advisory Board.
"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," said Xinchen Wang, co-founder and CEO of Waypoint Bio. "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."
Amplify Partners led the Series A. The firm focuses on early-stage technical founders and has a particular interest in companies applying computation to biology. Elliot Hershberg, who holds a PhD from Stanford and began his career studying computational biology and cancer vaccines, led the deal and joins Waypoint's board. General Catalyst, a multi-stage firm, joined alongside Time BioVentures, Mitsui Global Investments, and Lux Capital, a deep tech venture firm with offices in New York and Menlo Park. Hummingbird Ventures, which had backed Waypoint previously, also participated in the round.
The capital will support two clinical program entries in 2026 and continued platform development. Clinical entry for the lead program is expected in China in late 2026, through an investigator-initiated trial designed to generate human data efficiently.
