UK-based biotech Antiverse has secured $9.3 million in Series A funding to advance its mission to develop therapeutic antibodies for disease targets long considered undruggable. The round was led by Soulmates Ventures, with participation from Innovation Investment Capital and DOMiNO Ventures.
Previous backers, including DBW, Kadmos Capital and the i&i Biotech Fund, also participated. The company shared that this raise brings its total funding to more than $20 million. As revealed by Murat Tunaboylu, the co-founder of Antiverse, to TFN, “We are not disclosing the valuation at the moment.”
The capital will expand its antibody discovery platform, support internal therapeutic programmes and push lead candidates toward in vivo efficacy studies. For a field where roughly 90% of drug candidates fail, this infusion gives Antiverse the firepower to tackle targets that have resisted treatment for decades.
Cracking the code of undruggable disease targets
One of medicine’s biggest obstacles lies in diseases driven by proteins that are too small, unstable or embedded within cell membranes to be tackled using traditional drug discovery methods. These include G-protein coupled receptors (GPCRs) and ion channels, which influence conditions ranging from cancer and neurological disorders to cystic fibrosis.
More than 200 diseases linked to GPCRs still lack effective treatments, and fewer than ten FDA-approved antibodies currently target these proteins, a striking gap considering their central biological importance.
Antiverse aims to close this gap through a lab-in-the-loop approach. Instead of sifting through quadrillions of potential antibodies, its platform designs a focused set of highly specific candidates. These are generated through computational modelling and then built and tested in Antiverse’s own laboratories.
Importantly, the antibodies are tested on proprietary cell models that mimic how the target appears in the human body. The goal is to identify candidates with real-world therapeutic potential, ready for the next steps in clinical development.
How was the idea born?
As disclosed by Murat, “Antiverse was founded in 2017 by myself and Ben Holland. I am a software engineer by background and transitioned from high-frequency trading into biotech. Ben is an Oxford trained engineer. For me personally, the journey into biotech was shaped by experience. I was working in tech when my father was diagnosed with lung cancer. I saw firsthand how expensive illness is in real terms, and I switched to finance out of fear of it happening to someone else in my life. In finance, I found myself surrounded by traders with biology degrees, and I started wondering whether you could switch from finance to biology just as they had done the opposite.”
He added, “That curiosity drew me into synthetic biology, and it was through that path that I met Ben at the Deep Science Ventures accelerator in London. That is where we bonded over the idea of using machine learning to solve biological problems that are simply too complex for traditional methods. That shared belief became the foundation of Antiverse.”
Built for precision, speed and real clinical potential
Antibody discovery is notorious for slow timelines and high failure rates with nearly 90% of drug candidates never making it to approval. Antiverse accelerates the process by continuously cycling between design and experimentation, enabling rapid optimisation of antibody candidates.
The company’s therapeutic-strength antibodies are engineered from the outset to meet clinical requirements rather than serving as early-stage research hits. This approach significantly improves the chances that promising candidates can progress into human studies.
As part of its expanding portfolio, Antiverse has signed a research agreement with the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation to design antibodies targeting the extracellular region of the CFTR protein, a notoriously difficult target in cystic fibrosis research. The collaboration focuses on supporting faster evaluation of emerging therapeutic strategies and helping promising concepts move more quickly toward patients.
A growing list of global partnerships
Antiverse’s capabilities have already attracted several top-tier partners, including Nxera and multiple top-20 global pharmaceutical companies. These partnerships highlight confidence in its combined computational and laboratory approach.
Headquartered in Cardiff, with offices in Boston and Prague, the company blends proprietary datasets, advanced computational methods, and precision-engineered cell models to tackle the disease targets that mainstream drug discovery continues to struggle with.
What’s next?
Detailing the plan for the next 12 months, he added, “This Series A enables us to scale our AI-powered antibody discovery platform for pharmaceutical and foundation partners through collaborative programmes. In parallel, we are expanding our internal drug pipeline and advancing our lead antibody programmes toward in vivo efficacy studies.”
He continued, “We have also entered into a research agreement with the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation to design novel antibodies targeting the extracellular region of the cystic fibrosis transmembrane conductance regulator protein, a historically difficult target in cystic fibrosis research. This agreement is designed to support the rapid evaluation of emerging therapeutic modalities and help accelerate progression from early discovery to patients. Our broader goal is to advance our own drug candidates into animal trials, in vivo efficacy, by 2027.”
Murat Tunaboylu, Co-Founder and CEO of Antiverse, said: “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, where our technology is applied to explore challenging targets like extracellular CFTR. Together, these efforts help inform future research efforts and allow Antiverse to continue advancing our own therapeutic programs for patients.”
Michal Sikyta, Managing Partner at Soulmates Ventures, said: “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. This capability, combined with the AI-driven design and in-house labs, positions Antiverse on track to become a global leader and the go-to developer of antibody therapies for the most elusive disease targets in medicine”.
