Antiverse Raises £7M Series A to Scale AI-Designed Antibodies Against Diseases That Have No Treatment

March 3, 2026

Antiverse, the Cardiff-based AI-driven antibody discovery company, raised $9.3 million (£7 million) in a Series A round in March 2026, led by Soulmates Ventures, with participation from Innovation Investment Capital, DOMiNO Ventures, and existing investors including the Development Bank of Wales, Kadmos Capital, and i&i Biotech Fund. The round brings total funding raised to over $20 million since the company’s founding in 2017. The capital will scale Antiverse’s AI platform for pharmaceutical partners, expand its internal pipeline, and advance lead antibody candidates toward in vivo efficacy studies. Antiverse was co-founded by Murat Tunaboylu (CEO) and Ben Holland, and is headquartered in Cardiff’s sbarc|spark Social Science Research Park, with additional offices in Boston and Prague.

Drug discovery has one of the highest failure rates of any industrial process: roughly 90% of candidates that enter clinical trials never reach approval. The reasons are numerous, but one structural challenge stands out — the targets that cause the most disease are often the hardest to drug. G-protein coupled receptors (GPCRs) and ion channels are small, highly dynamic proteins embedded in cell membranes that regulate critical biological processes across virtually every organ system. They are implicated in more than 200 diseases — spanning cancer, neurological disorders, metabolic conditions, and rare genetic diseases like cystic fibrosis — for which effective treatments either do not exist or remain inadequate. Despite this, fewer than ten FDA-approved therapeutic antibodies target GPCRs. The reason is practical: these proteins are extremely difficult to isolate, study, and generate specific antibody candidates against using conventional discovery methods, which typically involve screening large natural antibody libraries against purified protein samples. GPCRs rarely survive purification in a functional, native state, making conventional screening unreliable.

Antiverse’s platform is built around a different approach. The company uses machine learning models — trained on seven years of proprietary data from difficult targets — to generate antibody candidate sequences computationally, designed from first principles to bind to a specific epitope on the target protein. These computationally designed candidates are then built in Antiverse’s own laboratories and tested on proprietary cell models that display the target protein as it appears in the human body: in its native membrane context, in its correct conformation, at physiologically relevant expression levels. This “lab-in-the-loop” cycle — design, build, test, iterate — allows Antiverse to produce therapeutic-grade antibodies in a defined domain within roughly four months, compared to timelines of one to three years for conventional approaches. Soulmates Ventures Managing Partner Michal Sikyta described this as a significant scientific and operational achievement that positions Antiverse to become the go-to developer of antibody therapies for the most elusive disease targets in medicine.

The strategic partnership portfolio at the time of the raise reflects commercial traction. Antiverse has secured collaboration agreements with multiple top-20 global pharmaceutical companies, including Nxera, and has entered a research agreement with the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation to design antibodies targeting the extracellular region of CFTR — the protein mutated in cystic fibrosis and one of the most historically intractable targets in the disease. The Foundation collaboration validates Antiverse’s claim to operate at the frontier of what is technically possible in antibody design. Innovation Investment Capital, the Cardiff Capital Region-backed fund, described Antiverse as a category-defining platform in drug discovery — one with the scientific strength and commercial model to scale from Cardiff to the world.

Sources