AstraZeneca, BASF, and Sanofi among 25+ enterprise customers, with more than 50 custom enzymes delivered

Proceeds will grow the commercial team and US presence, and fund a new Vilnius facility that accelerates the loop between AI design and the lab, cutting cycles from weeks to days

Biomatter, the custom enzyme design company, today announced the closing of an oversubscribed $18 million Series A financing led by Astanor, with participation from existing investors UVC Partners, Inventure, and Metaplanet.

Biomatter’s work is already in products, including Thermo Fisher Scientific’s Invitrogen™ SuperScript™ V Reverse Transcriptase, an enzyme used to convert RNA into DNA in molecular biology labs and mRNA research. Biomatter collaborated with the company to enhance the enzyme’s oxidation resistance, part of the reagent stability that supports ambient shipping and room-temperature storage for up to six months.

The financing will fund a new 2,000 m² (roughly 21,500 sq ft) design-and-testing facility in Vilnius, opening in 2027, which will bring more of the build-and-test loop in-house. Conventional enzyme programs take months or years. Biomatter’s programs run weeks, and the new facility is meant to bring them to days. The round will also expand the commercial team and the company’s US presence, where roughly half its customers are based, and continue investment in the computational platform and the enzyme dataset behind it.

“Our goal is to make a custom enzyme as easy to order as a catalog product, including for reactions that don’t have one today,” said Laurynas Karpus, CEO and co-founder of Biomatter. “This funding round lets us design enzymes from the chemistry up at a larger scale and get them into customers’ products faster.”

Biomatter designs enzymes from the target reaction, the chemistry a customer’s product needs, rather than from a starting natural enzyme and the natural data around it. That approach rests on years of generating its own enzyme data far from anything in nature, which is what lets Biomatter’s models make large jumps in sequence and structure. One program produced a methylase for mRNA vaccine manufacturing that works without SAM, an expensive additive every natural methylase depends on. That is not a better version of something that already existed. It is a chemical reaction nature doesn’t perform. Each design is tested in the lab before it ships.

“AI is moving out of software and into the physical world, and biology is where that shift is accelerating,” said Oliver Schoppe, Partner, UVC Partners. “Most companies working on AI for biology are still proving it works. Biomatter’s enzymes are already in products shipping from some of the largest manufacturers in Europe and the United States, which is why we increased our investment in this round.”

Biomatter has delivered more than 50 custom enzymes to more than 25 enterprise customers spanning Europe, the United States, and Japan. They include AstraZeneca, BASF, Kirin Holdings, Neogen, Sanofi, and Tereos, working across biopharma, diagnostics, agriculture, and industrial biotech. Several accounts have grown from a single project into multi-year, multi-enzyme programs. Each program also adds to a proprietary dataset of experimentally characterized enzymes that makes the next program faster and more accurate.

“Enzymes power hundreds of billions of dollars in food production and biomanufacturing. But because improving them takes months or years of trial and error, companies settle for suboptimal enzymes,” said Harry Briggs, Partner, Astanor. “The constraint has been data. Until now, the field has been limited to training on what exists in nature. Biomatter has spent years generating data beyond nature, which allows them to design enzymes that never evolved. They have world-class customers returning again and again, across an array of industries. That is the clearest signal there is.”

About Biomatter

Biomatter is the custom enzyme design company delivering catalysts that solve real-world problems across industries. Founded in 2018, Biomatter designs novel, high-performance enzymes from the chemistry up and delivers them to partners in biopharma, diagnostics, agriculture, and industrial biotech. The company has delivered more than 50 custom enzymes to more than 25 enterprise customers. Biomatter’s founders published one of the first demonstrations that generative models can produce functional enzymes far from anything found in nature (Nature Machine Intelligence, 2021). Discover more at biomatter.com.

About Astanor

Astanor is a global investment firm focused on seed through growth stage businesses addressing human and planetary health using agrifood technology as the biggest lever. Founded in 2017, Astanor counts circa 50 investments to date in Europe, North America, and beyond. Astanor’s mission is to invest in and support visionary entrepreneurs and management teams building scalable solutions for the transition to regenerative agriculture, sustainable food production, resilient supply chains, and restored metabolic health. For more information, please visit Astanor.

About UVC Partners

UVC Partners backs Europe’s most ambitious B2B tech founders building new category leaders. From DeepTech to AI, the firm has invested in breakout startups including Isar Aerospace, Proxima Fusion, Q.ANT, Aleph Alpha, Tacto, Flix, and FINN. With more than €800 million in assets under management, UVC Partners invests up to €10 million initially across multiple stages from early to growth. Over the lifetime of the investment, €40 million per company can be deployed. Beyond capital, UVC Partners' investment team is a "tech team for tech teams"— supporting founders in building and scaling market-leading companies. Through its unique access to UnternehmerTUM, Europe's leading innovation hub, the VC offers a powerful ecosystem of entrepreneurs, key corporate decision-makers, and top-tier researchers. UVC Partners' value-creation team provides direct access to a network of 1,000+ companies—potential customers and strategic partners.

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