Welsh firm Antiverse raises funds for AI antibody platform

UK biotech Antiverse has raised $9.3 million to accelerate its drug discovery programmes, based on an AI-powered platform for designing antibody-based therapeutics.

Cardiff, Wales-based Antiverse's computational platform has been set up to find antibodies against challenging drug targets, such as G-protein coupled receptors (GPCR) and ion channels and, according to the company, can take a project from target identification to a functional antibody in as little as six months.

The Series A funding has been backed by Innovation Investment Capital (IIC), the Cardiff Capital Region (CCR) backed fund, and the Development Bank of Wales, alongside other international investors.

Headquartered in Cardiff's Social Science Research Park, and with teams in Boston and Prague, Antiverse was founded in 2020 and formally launched in 2022 with an initial £50 million from UK government funds and CCR. Its platform has so far attracted multiple partnerships, including a deal with Japan's Nxera Pharma to design multiple antibodies targeting GPCRs – a complex and unstable class of proteins that play a vital role in cellular communication, making them prime targets across multiple diseases.

The company has also signed two more alliances with undisclosed pharma groups, one with a top-15 and the other with a top-30 company, involving the design of antibodies against a part of a transmembrane protein and a T-cell receptor (TCR), respectively. It has also been working with US biotech GlobalBio on anti-PD-1 antibodies, generating candidates that entered preclinical development.

The company's chief executive, Murat Tunaboylu – who co-founded Antiverse with chief technology officer Ben Holland – said the investment "enables us to scale our platform, grow our team, and deepen partnerships with pharma and biotech leaders worldwide," and will also lay the groundwork for a Series B filing.

Specifically, the cash injection will fund commercialisation efforts and support the creation of five new jobs, building on Antiverse's current headcount of 19.

Tunaboylu, a bioinformatics specialist who has previously held roles at Thermo Fisher Scientific and Deep Science Ventures, said: "For us, this is not just capital. It is validation. Validation that difficult, dynamic membrane targets such as GPCRs and ion channels are finally becoming tractable."

He also said it was validation of a recognition that "AI, when tightly coupled with lab data and proprietary biology, can move beyond hype and deliver picomolar, epitope-specific antibodies [and] validation that partners and foundations are willing to trust us with some of the most structurally constrained targets in drug discovery."