MENLO TIMES

Chai Discovery, the company engineering AI models to discover new molecules led by Joshua Meier and Matthew McPartlon, has announced a $400M Series C fundraise to further accelerate progress. The round, which values the company at $3.8B, was led by Index Ventures alongside Kleiner Perkins, Sequoia Capital, and Dimension. These firms were joined by new investors Bain Capital Ventures, Battery Ventures, Baillie Gifford, BDT & MSD, Sapphire Ventures, Avra Capital, and other nota

Alchemab Therapeutics, pioneering the next generation of antibody therapeutics for hard-to-treat diseases, led by Jane Osbourn, OBE, FMedSci, PhD, and the team, has extended its Series A financing with a £25 million (USD $34m) investment from the British Business Bank – the Bank’s largest investment in a life sciences company to date. The funding will enable the company to build its clinical pipeline and grow its proprietary unique antibody dataset to more than a billion sequ

64x Bio, enabling next-generation medicines, Lexi Rovner, PhD, George Church, PhD, David Thompson, PhD, Pamela Silver, PhD, Jeffrey Way, PhD, and the team, has announced the launch of LV Apex Suite, a new product line designed to support high-performance lentiviral vector manufacturing. Platform Expansion. The product launch marks 64x Bio's expansion into lentiviral vector production, extending the capabilities of its VectorSelect platform beyond adeno-associated virus (AAV)

Leyden Labs, freeing humanity from the burden of respiratory viruses, led by Koenraad Wiedhaup, Ronald Brus, and the team, has announced a €40 million investment from the European Innovation Council (EIC) Fund, Invest-NL, Gates Foundation, ClavystBio, and others. The Company welcomes Ben Verwaayen as a new Supervisory Board member. Nominated by EIC Fund and Invest-NL, Mr. Verwaayen brings decades of international leadership experience, having served in senior executive and bo

Graph Therapeutics, decoding immune dysfunction at scale, led by Gregory Vladimer, PhD, Robert Sehlke, PhD, Prof. Berend Snijder, PhD, Bojan Vilagos, PhD, and Christophe Boudesco, PhD, has announced that Daphni, the Paris-based venture capital firm, has joined Graph’s investor syndicate to accelerate its internal pipeline. Daphni invests alongside continued participation from existing investors SquareOne, Merantix Capital, and NAVEC Investment Management, with additional non-

Tamarind Bio, building AI infrastructure for biotech R&D, led by Deniz Kavi, Sherry Liu, and the team, is integrating NVIDIA-optimized NIM microservices into the inference layer that powers the Tamarind platform. Building the Infrastructure for Agentic Biology. Advances in AI are rapidly transforming how new molecules, drug candidates, diagnostics, and biological tools are discovered and designed. Yet computational biology workflows often remain complex, requiring researchers

Tamarind Bio, building AI infrastructure for biotech R&D, led by Deniz Kavi, Sherry Liu, and the team, has been selected by Lilly TuneLab as a third-party technology partner to build, host, and operate the inference infrastructure layer for TuneLab2.0, which is now live. Lilly Launches Collaborative AI Drug Discovery Platform. Eli Lilly and Company has introduced Lilly TuneLab, a collaborative AI and machine learning platform designed to accelerate drug discovery across the

Cellares, the first Integrated Development and Manufacturing Organization (IDMO), providing global cell therapy development and manufacturing services through an Industry 4.0 approach to the mass manufacture of living drugs, led by Fabian Gerlinghaus and Omar Kurdi, has announced that ARK Invest has joined the company’s Series D financing with a $20 million investment, bringing the total Series D to $277 million. ARK joins a high-caliber group of Cellares investors, including

IMU Biosciences, decoding the immune system with unprecedented resolution and scale to transform how we understand, diagnose, and treat disease, led by Adam Laing, Mario Cantero, John Baker, and Thomas Hayday, has successfully brought its Series A to over $53 million (£40 million) in an oversubscribed financing round, co-led by IQ Capital and Molten Ventures, and supported by The British Business Bank, and Meltwind alongside existing investors. Building a Comprehensive Map o

NewLimit, radically extending human healthspan, led by Jacob Kimmel, Brian Armstrong, Blake Byers, and the team, has closed a $435M Series C led by Founders Fund alongside new investors Thrive Capital, Greenoaks, and Quiet Capital, and returning investors Kleiner Perkins, Abstract, Nat Friedman/Daniel Gross, Valor Equity Partners, Eli Lilly Ventures, Human Capital, and others. The company plans to begin human clinical trials next year following the discovery of a prototype th

Blank Bio, RNA intelligence for precision oncology, led by Jonathan Hsu, Ruian (Ian) Shi, and Philip Fradkin, has announced the closing of a $7.2 million seed financing and a strategic collaboration with Pacific Biosciences (Nasdaq: PACB), a leading developer of high-quality, highly accurate sequencing solutions. The oversubscribed round included Define Ventures, Leonis Capital, Nova Threshold, Ripple Ventures, SignalFire, Y Combinator, and others. Proceeds will support conti

Pumpkinseed, the biology mining company, led by Dr. Jennifer Dionne, Dr. Jack Hu, and Nhat Vu, has announced a $20 million Series A funding round to scale its protein sequencing platform, mining biological functional data at a resolution and scale that simply hasn't existed before. The Series A round was co-led by NfX and Future Ventures, with participation from Base4 Capital, ADVentures, and Stanford, among others. The funding will accelerate Pumpkinseed’s deSIPHR platform t

Primogene, a biotechnology company developing bioprocesses to manufacture functional ingredients based on multi-enzyme systems, led by Dr.-Ing. Reza Mahour, Valerian Grote, and Linda Karger, has raised €4.1 million in funding to bring complex bioactive molecules to market at scale. The seed round is led by High-Tech Gründerfonds (HTGF) with additional investors including Technologiegründerfonds Sachsen (TGFS), better ventures, Sächsische Beteiligungsgesellschaft (SBG), Golzer

BioLamina , the leading primary cell culture system on the market, led by Klaus Langhoff-Roos and the team, has received a €20 million EIB commitment to expand its development of laminin technologies, enabling next-generation cell therapies and more advanced, animal-free methods for drug safety testing. Cell therapies can be used to target conditions such as type 1 diabetes, Parkinson’s disease, heart failure, acute liver failure, and cancer. Many of these conditions remain

Centivax , a clinical-stage company on a mission to accelerate the world’s transition to a post-pathogen humanity, led by Jacob Glanville , and the team, has announced the closing of a $37 million oversubscribed financing led by Structure Fund, with participation from Meiji Seika Pharma Co. , Ltd., Sigmas Group, Kendall Capital Partners , and Patrick(Stripe) and John Collison. Meiji Group holds the No. 1 market share for influenza vaccines in Japan. This financing builds o

Tamarind Bio , developing state-of-the-art molecular AI models usable out of the box, with no ML or infrastructure expertise required, so scientists can focus on drug discovery and research, led by Deniz Kavi and Sherry Liu, has announced $13.6M fundraise, including a $12M series A led by Dimension Capital , with participation from Y Combinator . As AI becomes embedded in real drug discovery workflows, no longer confined to experimental projects, life sciences organizations

Aerska , a biotechnology company using brain shuttle technology to develop RNA medicines for CNS diseases, led by Jack O’Meara, Stuart Milstein, Dave Hardwicke, and others, has raised $39 million in Series A financing led by EQT Dementia Fund and age1 , with participation from Iaso Ventures , alongside existing investors. Total funding has reached $60 million, following a seed round in October 2025. The funding will support the development of brain shuttle technology to enh

Biorce , a Barcelona-based health AI company specialized in applying artificial intelligence to the design and execution of clinical trials, led by Pedro Coelho, Clara Bernardes, José Faria, Diogo Pisoeiro, and others, has raised $52.5 million in a Series A round. The financing includes new investment from DST Global Partners , with existing investors Norrsken VC and YZR Capital increasing their participation, alongside participation from Mustard Seed Maze and Endeavor C

Mantis Biotech , the infrastructure powering human-in-computer models, led by Georgia Witchel, has announced $6.3 Million seed round, led by Decibel Partners , with participation from StoryHouse Ventures , Y Combinator , Pioneer Fund , Spot VC , and Fenwick . The Problem: The challenge isn’t a lack of data; it’s messy, fragmented, and hard-to-use data. Massive volumes of biological, performance, and operational information exist, but are scattered across systems and formats

ErVimmune , a biotechnology company developing next-generation therapeutic vaccines targeting new families of ‘unconventional’ tumor antigens derived from human endogenous retroviruses (HERVs), led by Stéphane Depil, Nathalie Donne, and others, has announced the first closing of its Series A financing. The company has raised €17 million ($19.8M) from an international investor syndicate. Existing shareholder Seventure Partners (Paris, France) participated in the fundraising,