- Graph Therapeutics has raised $5M, bringing total funding to over $10M, to develop its own drugs for inflammatory and immune diseases.
- The Vienna-based startup was founded by the team behind Allcyte, the AI drug discovery company Exscientia acquired for $60M in June 2021.
- Paris-based Daphni, backer of unicorns Back Market, Swile, and BlaBlaCar, joins the round as a new investor.
When Exscientia paid $60M for Allcyte in June 2021, it was buying one specific idea: that testing drugs against living tissue from real patients would outperform every artificial proxy the industry relied on.
Gregory Vladimer, who co-founded Allcyte and helped prove that idea in cancer, has a new company. His new company, Graph Therapeutics, applies that same approach to a harder problem, and has now raised $5M to stop licensing its platform and start developing its own medicines, bringing total funding to over $10M.
From platform to pipeline
Graph is based in Vienna and targets inflammation and immunology diseases, where the body’s own immune system turns against itself, causing conditions like rheumatoid arthritis, inflammatory bowel disease, and lupus. These conditions affect hundreds of millions of people globally. Yet most patients still cycle through multiple treatments before finding one that works, because the biological mechanisms driving each person’s disease differ in ways that standard drug screens cannot detect.
Graph’s answer is to skip the proxies entirely. The startup, which draws on the founding team’s experience at Allcyte, runs its experiments on living cells taken directly from patients with immune conditions. It then applies machine learning to the biological and chemical data from those experiments, identifying the precise disease targets and biological markers present in each patient’s tissue.
For example, the platform could take cells from a patient with inflammatory bowel disease, expose them to a range of compounds, measure how each cell responds at high resolution, and surface drug targets invisible to a conventional screen.
“Graph’s platform has reached a critical inflection point as we are now generating actionable biological insights that directly inform our own drug discovery programs. We have both the backing and the urgency to pursue precision medicines in inflammation and immunology, and to show the industry that rigorously decoding immune dysfunction in real patient cells reveals what actually drives disease,” says Vladimer.
Who else is in the space
Graph is not alone. Recursion Pharmaceuticals pairs wet lab biology with machine learning across multiple disease areas and trades publicly on Nasdaq. Relation Therapeutics uses single-cell genomics for drug discovery and has raised venture backing from investors including Foresite Capital. Immunai maps the human immune system to guide drug development and is well funded out of the US.
What sets Graph apart is the same thing that set Allcyte apart in cancer: it works only with living tissue from real patients, not models built to approximate them.
The investors and the bet
Paris-based Daphni joins the round as a new investor, alongside continued participation from SquareOne, Merantix Capital, and NAVEC Investment Management. Non-dilutive grants from Austria’s FFG and AWS make up the remainder of the $10M total.
Graph plans to use the capital to advance internal drug discovery programs across multiple disease indications and to pursue out-licensing deals where its platform has already generated validated results.
“Graph exemplifies the next generation of techbio: a company where deep technological innovation is inseparable from rigorous R&D, led by a team with a proven track record in precision medicine. The complexity of immune-mediated diseases demands exactly this kind of integrated approach, and we are excited to support the Graph Therapeutics team as they move into therapeutics,” adds Sofia Dahoune, partner at Daphni.
The immunology drugs market is one of the largest in biopharma. AbbVie’s Humira became the world’s best-selling drug before biosimilar competition began eroding its dominance, and the broader space has drawn sustained attention from big pharma: AstraZeneca, J&J, and Pfizer have all made significant acquisitions in the space in recent years, creating both validation of the opportunity and a high bar for smaller companies trying to establish a foothold.
Graph’s shift from platform licensing to internal drug development is a deliberate increase in risk, but one backed by independent validation from two Austrian government funding agencies and a new lead investor whose latest fund was built specifically for science-first deep tech.
Whether the Allcyte approach, proven in cancer, translates to the more complex and less well-mapped terrain of immune disease is the question this $5M now has to begin answering.
