Antiverse Raises £3.5M to Slash Antibody Drug Discovery Timelines With AI

Antiverse, a UK-based biotechnology company, has raised £3.5 million in a funding round from i&i Biotech Fund I, AngelHub, Innospark Ventures, Kadmos Capital, Tensor Ventures, and the UK Innovation & Science Seed Fund. The capital will be used to advance Antiverse's AI-driven antibody design platform, which the company believes can fundamentally change the speed and cost of antibody drug discovery by replacing the biology-first, trial-and-error approach of conventional programmes with a computationally-led design methodology.

Antibodies are among the most important and commercially successful class of drugs in modern medicine. Monoclonal antibodies are used to treat cancer, autoimmune conditions, infectious diseases, and inflammatory disorders, and represent a multi-hundred-billion-dollar global market. However, the conventional process of discovering and developing a new antibody drug candidate is slow, expensive, and highly uncertain. Traditional antibody discovery involves immunising animals, screening the resulting immune response for antibodies with useful binding properties, humanising those antibodies for therapeutic use, and then iterating through multiple rounds of affinity maturation and optimisation — a process that routinely takes two to four years before a candidate is ready for preclinical testing.

Antiverse's platform applies machine learning to accelerate and partially replace this process. The company uses computational models trained on large datasets of antibody-antigen binding data to predict which antibody sequences are likely to bind a given target with high affinity and selectivity, and to suggest structural modifications that improve therapeutic properties. This allows the generation and evaluation of antibody candidates computationally in weeks rather than years, dramatically reducing the cost and time of early-stage drug discovery. The platform is agnostic as to disease area, making it potentially applicable across the full breadth of antibody therapeutics programmes at pharmaceutical and biotech companies.

The funding round includes backing from the UK Innovation & Science Seed Fund, reflecting government recognition of AI-driven drug discovery as a strategically important area for the UK life sciences ecosystem. The i&i Biotech Fund I is an early-stage biotech vehicle with a focus on UK innovation. The combined investor group gives Antiverse both capital for development and access to networks across the biotech and deep tech investment communities. Funds will be used to expand the team, deepen the platform's capabilities, and build out the company's early partnerships with pharmaceutical companies seeking to integrate AI-driven discovery into their development pipelines.

Sources

• Antiverse — company website
• Crunchbase — Antiverse company profile