- ARK Invest has joined Cellares’ Series D with a $20M investment, bringing the total round to $277M.
- The syndicate includes BlackRock, Eclipse, T. Rowe Price, Baillie Gifford, Duquesne Family Office, Intuitive Ventures, Gates Frontier, EDBI, DC Global Ventures, DFJ Growth, and Willett Advisors.
- Funding will accelerate Cellares’ global Smart Factory network ahead of commercial-scale manufacturing in 2027.
Cell therapy has long promised to transform medicine, offering personalised treatments capable of tackling cancer, autoimmune diseases, and other complex conditions.
Yet despite the scientific breakthroughs, one challenge has consistently held the industry back: manufacturing. Unlike traditional drugs, cell therapies are living medicines produced individually for patients under highly controlled conditions. The process is expensive, labour-intensive, and difficult to scale — limiting access to potentially life-saving treatments.
Cellares wants to change that. The San Francisco-based company has announced that Cathie Wood’s ARK Invest has invested $20 million into its Series D financing, bringing the total round to $277 million and total funding raised to approximately $632 million.
ARK joins a syndicate including BlackRock, Eclipse, T. Rowe Price Investment Management, Baillie Gifford, Duquesne Family Office, Intuitive Ventures, EDBI, Gates Frontier, DC Global Ventures, DFJ Growth, and Willett Advisors.
“The science behind cell therapy is proven. The challenge now is manufacturing these life-saving treatments at the scale and cost required to meet patient demand,” Cathie Wood, founder, CEO, and CIO of ARK Invest.
Building the infrastructure for personal medicine
Cellares was founded in 2019 by Fabian Gerlinghaus and Omar Kurdi with a mission to industrialise cell therapy manufacturing. The founders identified a growing gap between scientific progress and manufacturing capacity: while researchers were developing increasingly promising therapies, production remained largely manual and constrained by unscalable cleanrooms.
To close that gap, Cellares created what it calls the first Integrated Development and Manufacturing Organisation, combining automation, manufacturing, quality control, and development services into a single model. At the centre of its platform is the Cell Shuttle, a system for end-to-end cell therapy manufacturing.
Cell Q, the company’s automated quality-control platform, handles production and release testing. Together, these allow drug developers to manufacture therapies more consistently, at lower cost, and at greater scale than traditional contract manufacturers.
Why ARK is betting on automated biotech
ARK’s investment follows a series of milestones that have transformed Cellares from a manufacturing platform into a clinically validated business.
In April 2026, the company successfully manufactured and delivered the first two GMP doses of rese-cel, Cabaletta Bio’s investigational CAR-T therapy, using the Cell Shuttle.
A 10-year commercial manufacturing agreement with Cabaletta Bio followed, alongside a previously announced $380 million global manufacturing agreement with Bristol Myers Squibb covering commercial-scale capacity across the US, Europe, and Japan.
From ARK’s perspective, Cellares sits at the intersection of robotics, software, automation, and biotechnology, an infrastructure platform designed to support the next generation of medicine. The new capital will help expand the company’s global network across the United States, Europe, and Japan ahead of commercial-scale operations targeted for 2027.
Competition
Cellares operates in a cell therapy market projected to grow from $3.1 billion in 2024 to $12.8 billion by 2032. Competitors include Ori Biotech, which has raised $101 million to automate cell therapy manufacturing at clinical and commercial scales, and Cellino, which has raised $125 million to develop AI- and laser-based cell engineering technologies.
Traditional CDMOs, including Lonza and Samsung Biologics, are also scaling their cell therapy manufacturing capacity. What differentiates Cellares isn’t the vertically integrated IDMO model, but the full stack from development through release testing and manufacturing within a single platform with already-signed commercial agreements at scale.
What’s next
Cellares currently operates facilities in San Francisco and Bridgewater, New Jersey, and is developing Smart Factories in Leiden, the Netherlands, and Kashiwa City, Japan.
The harder question is not whether cell therapy manufacturing can be automated, as Cellares has now answered that at a clinical scale. It is about whether the company can bring costs down far enough and quickly enough to make these therapies economically viable for the health systems that will ultimately have to pay for them.
