Biomatter raises a €6.5 million seed round to unlock the power of generative AI for enzyme design
Vilnius, 5 August 2024 – Biomatter, a leading enzyme design company, has successfully closed a €6.5 million seed funding round jointly led by Inventure and UVC Partners. In 2019 Biomatter unveiled the first fully functional enzymes created with generative AI in Nature Machine Intelligence. This was a paramount milestone for the synthetic biology field, spawning multiple new research and development directions across the globe. Now, Biomatter’s Intelligent Architecture™ platform allows building new enzymes “bottom-up”, without the traditional constraints of natural enzymes, greatly expanding the potential scope of their applications. With a rapidly growing global customer base (incl. Thermo Fisher Scientific, BASF, Neogen), the new investment round will enable Biomatter to further expand the unique capabilities of their platform and create de novo enzymes.
Enzymes - key to the future of bioeconomy
As the world’s population continues to grow, there is an urgent need for solutions in medicine, in decarbonizing chemical manufacturing, and to provide healthy, nutritious food more efficiently. Enzymes are the key molecules that can provide the foundation for this transformation to happen. Today, nature-derived enzymes play major roles in various industrial applications, such as in diagnostics (e.g., with DNA polymerases), in gene editing (e.g., with CRISPR), in bio-fuels (e.g., with cellulases), or in agriculture (e.g., with phytases). However, each new application requires a brand new enzyme, and enzyme design still remains a tremendous challenge in the field. Current engineering approaches rely on expensive trial-and-error screening and making small changes to natural enzymes – a process that can take months or even years and suffers from inherent limitations. This greatly limits the functions that can be designed and ultimately the application scope that can be accessed. The unique technology created by the team at Biomatter allows us to overcome these challenges.
"Enzymes will play a paramount part in the future of bioeconomy - they are the enabling piece that ultimately allows us to create new molecules, cells and organisms for the world. The unique enzymes we have successfully developed for our global partners so far demonstrate our capability to go far beyond the existing enzyme improvement paradigm. At Biomatter, we believe that the unlimited capacity to design new enzymes will help to build a better tomorrow for everyone," says Laurynas Karpus, Co-founder and CEO of Biomatter.
Innovative technology for a sustainable future
The clear limitations of designing new enzymes motivated Biomatter to create a scalable solution for this challenge. In 2019, the Biomatter team has published a key study showcasing that their developed generative AI tool can understand the intricacies of large amounts of enzyme data and then be repurposed to design completely new enzymes. This was a major breakthrough that for the first time ever showcased the ability to create fully functional enzymes with generative AI.
The Intelligent Architecture™ platform is a result of multiple years of research from scientists and engineering teams at Biomatter and it allows the company to take a profoundly different approach to enzyme design.
Traditional enzyme engineering approaches rely on making small changes to naturally occurring enzymes, and this is often the key bottleneck that imposes a heavy limitation on what kind of new functions or properties we can design, as they just have not evolved for that particular purpose!
At Biomatter, the developed platform allows the enzymes to be engineered bottom-up, starting from the first principles. First, the ideal characteristics of the enzyme are described, carefully taking into account the end-application. The enzymes are then designed de novo (from scratch) or by drastically redesigning existing natural protein scaffolds. This allows the protein engineers to only be limited by their imagination, and built fit for purpose molecules starting from the first atom.
This innovation has been enabled by the development of new generative artificial intelligence and physical algorithms at Biomatter, that steadily improve in fast iterations of experimental validation in the wet lab, to create truly unique enzymes.
"AI-powered protein design is currently one of the most exciting and dynamic areas for venture capital. Biomatter's innovative approach to designing enzymes from scratch enables them to go beyond the limits of natural enzymes, leading to breakthroughs in biotech. We are deeply impressed by the team and convinced that Biomatter is the trailblazer for AI-based protein design.", says Dr. Oliver Schoppe, Principal at UVC Partners.
Differentiated enzymes across multiple industries
With the Intelligent Architecture™ platform, Biomatter rapidly creates tailored enzymes for multiple different industries, including chemical biomanufacturing, agriculture, food and life sciences. It takes down the development cycle from years to weeks. To date, Biomatter has successfully developed unique enzymes for companies like Thermo Fisher Scientific, BASF and Neogen.
In an advancement for infant nutrition, Biomatter and Kirin, one of the world’s largest nutrition & health companies, have demonstrated successful collaboration results in efficient enzyme-based production of Human Milk Oligosaccharides (HMOs) by novel engineered enzymes, specifically focusing on he synthesis of one of the most relevant HMO in human milk (lacto-N-fucopentaose I, or short: LNFP I). HMOs are crucial for infant health, offering numerous benefits such as supporting gut health, boosting immunity, and protecting against infections. The ability to produce HMOs like LNFP I on an industrial scale means that more infants worldwide can access these benefits.
“The application of AI in protein design will be transformational, addressing major current design limitations. Early results from projects with global companies show that Biomatter’s technology is dramatically accelerating innovation in this transformative field, reshaping the implementation of enzymes in incumbent and new structures. The team is rapidly expanding its platform to meet high customer demand." says Kevin Lösch, Investment Manager at Inventure VC.
With a rapidly growing global customer base, the new investment round will enable Biomatter to further expand the unique capabilities of its platform and create new-to-the-world enzymes. The round was led by Inventure and UVC Partners and joined by existing investors, Practica Capital and Metaplanet, as well as business angels and industry experts.
About Biomatter
Biomatter is a synthetic biology company creating new-to-world enzymes for medicine, agriculture, chemical biomanufacturing, and life science applications. By partnering with global companies (incl. Thermo Fisher Scientific, BASF, Neogen) across different industries, Biomatter launches new bio-based products and technologies enabled by their unique enzymes. This funding round marks a significant milestone for Biomatter, positioning the company well for completing the next major milestones and future growth. Learn more at www.biomatter.com.
About UVC Partners
UVC Partners is a leading Munich- and Berlin-based early-stage venture capital firm that invests in European B2B tech start-ups from pre-seed to series A. With about €400 million in assets under management, UVC Partners typically invests between €500,000 and €10 million initially and up to €30 million per company. The portfolio includes category leaders in deep tech, climate tech, hard- and software, and mobility with various technologies and business models. As an independent partner of UnternehmerTUM, Europe's most extensive innovation and startup center, UVC Partners has access to proprietary deal flow, an industrial network of more than 1,000 corporates, and access to talent from the leading European technical university. The investments include Flix, Vimcar, planqc, Tanso, Isar Aerospace, TWAICE, DeepDrive, STABL, and many more. They all benefit from the team's extensive investment and exit experience, their ability to build sustainable category leaders with a competitive advantage, and their passion for growing the game changers of tomorrow. Learn more at www.uvcpartners.com.
About Inventure VC
Inventure is the early-stage VC that knows how to get Nordic and Baltic founders to the next level. Since 2005, the team has been in venture with over 90 companies ranging from deep tech to consumer internet brands, with offices in Helsinki and Stockholm. With its €377 million of assets under management, Inventure focuses on early-stage investments across Nordics and Baltics, typically with ticket sizes ranging from €500,000 to up to €5,000,000. Notable investments include Wolt, Swappie, AiMotive, Canatu, Lassie, Stravito or Medoma. Learn more at www.inventure.vc.
