Drug discovery company LabGenius has closed a £35 million Series B financing round.
The investment brings total funding at London-based LabGenius, pioneering the use of machine learning for the discovery of novel therapeutic antibodies, to £58m.
It will use the new funds to further develop its ML-driven drug discovery platform. The company will also progress a wholly-owned pipeline of multispecific antibodies for the treatment of solid tumours towards the clinic.
Building on the success of a recent research collaboration with Sanofi, it says the extended platform capability will facilitate broader strategic partnerships across multiple therapeutic modalities.
LabGenius’ unique discovery capability is powered by EVA, a smart robotic platform capable of designing, conducting and, critically, learning from its own experiments. This highly automated closed-loop discovery engine enables the rapid identification of high-performing antibodies with non-intuitive designs.
The round was led by new investor M Ventures – the strategic, corporate venture capital arm of science and technology company Merck – with participation from additional new investors Octopus Ventures and LG Corp, together with existing investors including Atomico, Kindred Capital, Lux Capital and Obvious Ventures.
Oliver Hardick of M Ventures (pictured, right) and Oliver Sims of Octopus Ventures have joined existing directors Irina Haivas of Atomico, Leila Zegna of Kindred Capital, James Field (CEO, pictured left) and Edwin Moses (independent chair) to form the company’s new board of directors.
“Being able to engineer complex multispecific antibodies has immense potential value,” said Dr Field. “I am inspired by the relentless drive that our team has shown in getting us to this important milestone and look forward to working with our investors as we accelerate the development of both our platform and pipeline.”