Nuclera Extends Series C to £65m with £9m Round Led by Elevage to Advance Antibody Engineering

Nuclera, the Cambridge and Boston-based biotechnology company accelerating drug discovery through rapid access to functional proteins, has closed a £9 million Series C extension led by Elevage Medical Technologies and Jonathan Milner — the latter serving as Chairman of Nuclera's board and founder and former CEO of Abcam. Existing investors British Business Bank and GK Goh also joined the extension, bringing Nuclera's total Series C funding to £65 million. The proceeds will fund the integration of full-format antibody expression, purification and binding validation into the company's eProtein Discovery benchtop system.

Protein expression and purification sit at the heart of biologics drug discovery, but conventional cell-based methods are slow, resource-intensive and subject to high variability between experiments. For research teams trying to screen large numbers of protein candidates in early-stage discovery, the bottleneck at this stage can significantly extend timelines and compress the window available to explore the most promising therapeutic leads. The problem is particularly acute for full-format antibodies, which are among the most clinically relevant biologics but among the most technically demanding to synthesise at research scale.

Nuclera's eProtein Discovery system addresses this through a combination of cell-free expression technology, digital microfluidics and multiplex screening, enabling researchers to express, purify and characterise proteins — including challenging membrane proteins — in under 48 hours on a single benchtop instrument. Prior to this extension, the company had expanded its product with a membrane protein workflow, grown its global customer footprint across the Asia-Pacific region and the Middle East, and entered a collaboration with Cytiva to accelerate the path from DNA to fully purified and characterised proteins. It also completed the first commercial research organisation installation of the system at Domainex.

The new capabilities being funded by this extension will allow researchers to carry out end-to-end antibody work — from expression and purification through to binding validation of full-format antibodies — on the same integrated high-throughput platform. This is strategically significant as biologics discovery moves toward AI-enabled workflows that require large volumes of standardised, high-quality protein characterisation data. Nuclera's system is positioned as the instrumentation layer that generates those datasets at scale.

Elevage Medical Technologies, which led both this extension and the preceding Series C tranche, has been a consistent backer as Nuclera has expanded its platform from an initial protein expression focus toward a broader role in antibody engineering and AI-enabled biologics discovery. Jonathan Milner's participation, alongside his chairmanship of Nuclera's board, underscores the strategic alignment between the company's direction and the broader trajectory of the biologics tools market he has tracked throughout his career.

Sources

• Soapbox VC – Nuclera lands £9m Series C extension
• Nuclera – Nuclera extends Series C funding to $87M
• Startup Mag – British Business Bank backs Nuclera £8.9m round
• EU-Startups – UK’s Nuclera brings Series C funding to €74 million