➢ 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