Antiverse raises £7m to advance AI-designed antibodies into later-stage preclinical development
This article covers Antiverse, a UK biotech startup, which has raised £7m in a growth funding round announced as a Series A to scale its AI-designed antibody discovery platform and push its internal pipeline toward in vivo efficacy studies. The funding is intended to expand collaborative programmes with pharmaceutical and foundation partners and to advance candidates targeting difficult membrane proteins such as GPCRs and CFTR toward later-stage preclinical development.
Antiverse, a UK biotech startup, has raised £7 million in a growth funding round (announced as a Series A) to scale its AI-designed antibody discovery platform and push its internal pipeline toward in vivo efficacy studies. The capital will be used to expand collaborative programmes with pharmaceutical and foundation partners and to progress wholly owned candidates into later-stage preclinical development.
Why it matters
Drug discovery remains highly risky: roughly 90% of candidates fail in clinical development. Antiverse is targeting a persistent gap in therapeutics by designing antibodies against difficult membrane proteins such as G-protein coupled receptors (GPCRs) and ion channels. GPCRs are implicated in hundreds of diseases, yet fewer than ten FDA-approved therapeutic antibodies target them today. If Antiverse’s approach shortens discovery timelines and produces clinically usable antibodies for these targets, it could broaden treatment options for conditions ranging from neurological disorders to rare genetic diseases such as cystic fibrosis.
Inside the product
Antiverse combines machine learning with in-house laboratory work in a lab-in-the-loop model. The company generates antibody candidates computationally, synthesises and tests them in its own labs against proprietary cell models that present the target protein in a native-like state, then iterates between design and experimental data to refine candidates. That workflow is intended to produce therapeutic-strength antibodies ready for clinical development.
The startup is applying this platform to hard-to-drug membrane proteins, including the extracellular region of the cystic fibrosis transmembrane conductance regulator (CFTR). Antiverse says its platform can rapidly evaluate emerging modalities and accelerate progression from early discovery to patient-ready candidates. It also holds partnership agreements with multiple top-20 global pharmaceutical companies, including Nxera, which provide routes to development and potential commercialisation.
Who are the investors?
The £7 million round was led by Soulmates Ventures, with participation from Innovation Investment Capital and DOMiNO Ventures. The financing brings Antiverse’s total capital raised to more than £15 million and is earmarked to scale the company’s generative antibody design platform, extend strategic collaborations and advance internal programmes toward later-stage preclinical work.
In the announcement, Michal Sikyta, Partner at Soulmates Ventures, said:
Antiverse is tackling one of the most technically demanding problems in drug discovery. The team’s ability to reduce the development time for de novo therapeutic-grade antibodies in a defined domain to under four months is a significant scientific and operational achievement. This capability, combined with the AI-driven design and in-house labs, positions Antiverse on track to become a global leader and the go-to developer of antibody therapies for the most elusive disease targets in medicine.
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Founder perspective
In the announcement, Murat Tunaboylu, Co-founder & CEO at Antiverse, said:
Many biologically important targets have remained difficult to drug using conventional antibody discovery methods. This Series A financing enables us to scale our generative antibody design platform, accelerate our internal pipeline, and expand strategic collaborations such as our work with the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation, where our technology is applied to explore challenging targets like extracellular CFTR. Together, these efforts help inform future research efforts and allow Antiverse to continue advancing our own therapeutic programs for patients.
Tunaboylu and the company say the new funding will support collaborative programmes with pharmaceutical partners and a research agreement with the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation focused on designing antibodies to CFTR. Antiverse aims to progress its first wholly owned candidates into later-stage preclinical development by 2027 while continuing partner-led discovery projects.
The bigger picture
Antibody discovery is a growing market — projected to exceed USD 20.43 billion by 2034 — and there is increasing appetite among biotech investors for technologies that lower attrition and speed up development. Antiverse sits at the intersection of AI-driven design and experimental biology, a model other companies in the sector are also pursuing to address targets that have proved elusive to conventional methods.
The company’s work on GPCRs, ion channels and extracellular CFTR highlights both a scientific challenge and an opportunity: many disease-linked membrane proteins remain under-served by existing biologics. Success here would expand the range of targetable mechanisms and could influence how pharmaceutical partners prioritise antibody discovery programmes.
This deal underscores continued investor interest in UK and European biotech startups that combine computational design with wet lab capabilities, and it adds to a wave of funding aimed at closing the gap between in silico discovery and clinically relevant candidates.
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