The San Francisco-based company with an R&D facility in Bilbao has also unveiled its Platforma.bio Software Development Kit, transforming how biologists analyze genomic data to drive drug discovery and advance adjacent fields in medicine.

• This latest financing bolsters the company’s efforts to transform computational biology on a global scale and empower researchers with innovative tools to accelerate discoveries and advancements in the field
• Led by Kfund with participation from Speedinvest, Acrobator Ventures, Ten13, Somersault Ventures, EGB Capital, and Courtyard Ventures
• Series A capital to be utilized for attracting top-tier talent and expanding into new markets, with a strategic emphasis on the United States

SAN FRANCISCO–(BUSINESS WIRE)–MiLaboratories, a leader in computational biology innovation, is thrilled to announce the successful close of its Series A funding round, led by Madrid-based Kfund, with additional backing from Speedinvest and other prominent international investors. This funding milestone comes alongside the launch of its cutting-edge Platforma.bio Software Development Kit (SDK), a revolutionary tool that streamlines and transforms how biologists build and deliver analytics and insights from next-generation sequencing data.

Empowering Biologists to Overcome NGS Data Challenges and Accelerate Genomic Research

Biotech and pharmaceutical companies often face significant challenges when integrating next-generation sequencing (NGS) technology, particularly regarding computational infrastructure and scalability. One major issue is the biologists’ reliance on bioinformaticians to analyze the vast amounts of genomic data generated by NGS. Since bioinformatics requires specialized skills and computational resources, biologists frequently depend on overburdened bioinformatic teams, creating bottlenecks that delay research and actionable insights.

These challenges, along with data interoperability issues, high scaling costs, and the complexity of managing large datasets, further slow progress in drug discovery and research.

To overcome these hurdles, MiLaboratories has developed a high-performance software platform that empowers biologists to analyze NGS data independently. By providing an intuitive, scalable solution, MiLaboratories reduces the dependency on bioinformaticians, speeds up data processing, and integrates seamlessly with existing systems, accelerating research and fostering greater collaboration in genomics.

Platforma.bio SDK Equips Researchers with Intuitive Tools for Complex Computational Analysis

Platforma.bio offers a user-friendly, UI-centric design that simplifies the use of advanced computational biology tools, making them accessible to scientists without the steep learning curve of traditional systems. Researchers can focus on their work while the platform automates resource management, data handling, and complex processes.

In line with MiLaboratories’ commitment to academic research, the Platforma.bio Software Development Kit (SDK) is accessible from their open marketplace and is free for academic scientists, enabling them to develop custom analytical tools and applications. This open, collaborative approach fosters innovation and accelerates discovery by empowering researchers to tailor solutions to their specific needs.

“We believe that opening our platform to the developer community will accelerate the adoption of modern computational tools, setting the next level of biomedical research,” said Stan Poslavsky, CEO of MiLaboratories. “Today, therapy development is driven by data, algorithms, and AI. Our mission is to make cutting-edge computational advances accessible to researchers as they work towards discovering new drugs.”

Seeking the Talent to Drive Global Market Transformation

With a multi-billion dollar global market potential, MiLaboratories is poised to significantly scale its operations in the coming years by focusing its efforts on attracting top-tier talent and strategically expanding its operations, with a primary focus on the United States.

“Investing in platforms that bridge the gap between developers (in this case bioinformaticians) and business users (in this case biologists) is at the core of what we want to do in our fund. There is tremendous potential in democratizing access to complex data enabling the delivery of immunological insights,” remarked Miguel Arias, General Partner of Kfund.

For additional details about the new Platforma release or the Series A investment round, please reach out to press@milaboratories.com.

About MiLaboratories

MiLaboratories stands at the forefront of computational biology, creating game changing software solutions that redefine the parameters of biological research and development. Committed to innovation and user empowerment, MiLaboratories equips the scientific community with adaptable, cutting-edge tools designed to meet the dynamic demands of bioinformatics and biomedical research.

For more information, visit https://platforma.bio/.

About Kfund

Kfund is a multi-stage, multi-product fund family that supports entrepreneurs in Southern Europe and Latin America. With over €550 million in assets, the fund invests from the pre-seed stage to Series B, offering checks ranging from €100,000 to €15 million.

For more information, visit https://www.kfund.vc/

About Speedinvest

Speedinvest is a leading early-stage venture capital firm with more than €1 billion AuM and 40+ investors based in Berlin, London, Munich, Paris, and Vienna. Our dedicated sector-focused teams are the first to fund Europe’s most innovative technology startups and our in-house operational experts are on hand to offer founders ongoing support with growth, HR, market expansion, and more. Bitpanda, GoStudent, Wayflyer, Open, CoachHub, Schüttflix, TourRadar, Adverity, and TWAICE are among our portfolio of 300+ companies.

For more information, visit https://www.speedinvest.com/

About Acrobator

Acrobator is a seed-stage venture capital firm based in Amsterdam. It is focused on backing CIS/CEE/Baltics-originating founders building global software companies. We specialize in data-heavy and mid-layer technologies within fintech, tech bio, cyber security, robotics and enabling technologies. We support founders by means of a wide range of coaches and mentors.

For more information, visit https://www.acrobator.vc

Contacts

press@milaboratories.com

➢ Company builds integrated AI and wet lab technologies to design developable, selective, and functionally active protein drugs against multipass membrane protein targets

➢ Radical Ventures leads new investment in Nabla Bio as company secures strategic pharmaceutical collaborations worth more than $550M total

CAMBRIDGE, Mass.–(BUSINESS WIRE)–Nabla Bio (aka “Nabla”), pioneers in generative protein design, today announced the close of a $26 million Series A financing, led by Radical Ventures with participation from all existing investors, and strategic collaborations with AstraZeneca, Bristol Myers Squibb Company and Takeda, worth more than $550 million in upfront and milestone payments, plus royalties.

Nabla develops integrated AI and wet-lab technologies that enable atomically precise drug design and high-throughput measurement of drug function, with an initial focus on antibodies targeting multipass membrane proteins, including for example, G protein-coupled receptors (GPCRs), ion channels, and transporters.

“We are unlocking new opportunities to build highly selective drugs against validated, but hard-to-drug targets with a degree of structural precision not previously possible,” said Nabla Co-Founder and CEO Surge Biswas. “We are excited to welcome Radical Ventures as our newest investor and to announce collaborations with three of the world’s largest pharmaceutical companies to help us bring our work closer to patients.”

Today, nearly all approved protein drugs are focused on soluble, extracellular targets, for which traditional brute force drug discovery technologies can yield antibodies with comparative ease. On the other hand, multipass membrane proteins are far more challenging to drug, due to their membrane-integrated nature, limited extracellular availability, conformational dynamics, and structural similarity across targets.

Given multipass membrane targets comprise two-thirds of all cell surface proteins and their central and varied involvement in controlling cell behavior, these targets have long been the “holy grail” of protein drug development. Nabla’s generative protein design platform is unlocking hundreds of these previously inaccessible targets by enabling the precise design of conformation- and target-selective antibody binders.

“With the technologies we’re developing, we could double the number of disease-relevant drug targets the industry goes after,” said Nabla Co-Founder Frances Anastassacos. “That’s an untapped therapeutic opportunity and why several leading pharmaceutical companies have collaborated with us.”

“We’re excited to be working with Nabla and using their generative antibody design and high throughput screening capabilities with the aim to design new drug candidates against challenging targets,” said Puja Sapra, Senior Vice President of Biologics Engineering and Oncology Targeted Delivery, AstraZeneca.

To maximize the patient impact of its platform, Nabla collaborates with leading pharmaceutical companies with a track record of successful drug development to expand their pipelines with high-quality drug candidates against some of the most challenging, high-impact targets. These collaborations also offer valuable insights into disease biology and platform development while offsetting a significant portion of R&D expense, enabling Nabla to grow quickly and sustainably.

Across its collaborations, Nabla has demonstrated the broad applicability of its platform, beyond drug design for multipass membrane proteins. This includes, for example, the design of novel cytokines, complex multi-domain antibodies, and receptor traps with greater in vitro activity and developability than leading drugs on the market. These results are an important step in translating generative protein design to clinical therapies and evidence of Nabla’s expanding capabilities.

“Generative AI and large language models are poised to master the language of proteins in the same way that they have mastered natural language in recent years, with profound implications for medicine,” said Radical Ventures Partner Rob Toews. “The world-class team at Nabla Bio helped pioneer this field. Their groundbreaking work on multipass membrane protein targets offers to revolutionize antibody therapeutics and has won them major commercial partnerships with several of the world’s largest pharmaceutical companies. We are thrilled to lead Nabla’s Series A.”

Nabla Bio launched in December 2021 with funding from Khosla Ventures and Zetta Venture Partners, to apply cutting-edge generative models to the design of protein-based therapies. The company builds on co-founder Surge Biswas’ work on the first protein language models published in a series of Nature Methods and Nature Biotechnology papers (2019, 2021, 2022) alongside colleagues in George Church’s Harvard Lab, which helped establish the field. Frances Anastassacos co-founded Nabla after working in biotech venture capital and completing her PhD at Harvard.

About Nabla Bio

Nabla Bio develops AI and wet-lab technologies that enable the rational design of developable, selective, and functional drugs against previously undruggable targets. Since launching in 2021 the company has raised $37 million with the backing of leading investors, including Radical Ventures, Khosla Ventures and Zetta Venture Partners. The company is headquartered in Cambridge, Mass. and continues to hire top machine learning and synthetic biology talent. For more information visit nabla.bio.

Contacts

Media:
Amanda Guisbond

Intersection: Health

amanda@nabla.bio

The fundraise will be used to accelerate product development for America’s retirees to get the most consumer-first Medicare guidance with the best available technology.

NEW YORK–(BUSINESS WIRE)–Chapter, the fastest-growing Medicare navigation platform in the country, announced today that it raised $50 million in Series C funding led by XYZ Venture Capital with participation from existing investors Narya Capital, Addition, Susa Ventures, and Maverick Ventures. This capital will accelerate product development and hiring as Chapter scales to support 10x more Americans in need of better healthcare coverage. Chapter is also proud to be the Medicare partner for the most forward-leaning healthcare and financial institutions in the country, and the new funding will expand Chapter’s ability to offer cutting-edge enterprise capabilities that drive growth for partners.

Selecting a Medicare plan is one of the most consequential decisions retirees face. Chapter ensures consumers get the right Medicare coverage for their needs at the lowest possible price. As the only unbiased Medicare navigation platform, Chapter aligns incentives between Medicare advisors and consumers by considering all options and making recommendations independent from economic relationships. The Company’s proprietary technology platform ensures the highest quality guidance at scale, allowing it to serve both individual members and organizations that support seniors, including financial advisories, health systems, and content publishers.

“The Medicare industry is in the midst of rapid transformation at every level: policy and regulation, consumer expectations, and underlying plan design. Chapter brings a fiduciary approach to Medicare guidance and advocates for policies that protect consumers,” says Chapter CEO Cobi Blumenfeld-Gantz “I’m so excited to deepen our partnerships across the industry to move faster toward every American getting the Medicare guidance and experience they deserve.”

This fundraise comes on the heels of the most significant regulatory change to how Medicare will reach consumers in over a decade. As the only broker invited to testify before Congress on necessary improvements to Medicare, Chapter pushed for realigning incentives to benefit consumers — a point of view that has since helped shape the newly-issued rules. As one example, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) will now prohibit lead generation websites from selling consumer data to multiple buyers simultaneously. This is a welcomed change that will reduce unwanted calls and harassment for America’s seniors. All of this aligns with Chapter’s view of the industry, making it one of the only players in the market advocating for consumer-centric service in compliance with these new rules.

Chapter has partnered with the leading financial institutions, health systems, and content publishers to grow quickly and efficiently. With over 4x year-over-year growth and 5x less churn than the industry standard, Chapter is the frontrunner in the category, influencing how both regulators and industry leaders believe Medicare should be delivered in the future.

“Chapter has designed state-of-the-art technology that makes a truly best-in-class experience work at scale for seniors, while still providing deep, granular information on providers, drug pricing, and more,” says Ross Fubini, Managing Partner at XYZ Venture Capital. “They’re also seeing this incredible pull from the ecosystem at large. Investment advisors, hospital groups, physicians — the biggest content sites devoted to seniors — they’re all eager to deliver better value to their customers and see Chapter as the way to do it. They’re exactly the type of team that makes us so excited to invest in the public sector, and work with folks like them from their earliest innings.”

In addition to this funding announcement, Chapter is excited to share the launch of its new Over The Counter (OTC) product, enabling consumers to quickly and easily redeem OTC benefits in their plans. Many Medicare plans include a host of benefits, but these features are often difficult to navigate and access. The Chapter OTC product allows consumers to scan their insurance card and quickly get the benefits they’ve been promised. This is just one example of the new products the Chapter team has been building, with more to come on the roadmap.

Chapter is excited to bring on new partners, who are already seeing significant organic growth and retention by partnering with Chapter for Medicare guidance. Whether they are healthcare systems, financial services institutions, or senior-facing content publishers, their connections with Chapter have allowed them to amplify the positive impact they too can make on their patients, clients, and readers — all contributing to a better, more holistic system of care for our aging population.

Contacts

For more information:

Jordan McElwain

media@askchapter.org