Biomatter has closed an oversubscribed $18 million Series A to scale its AI platform for designing custom enzymes. The round was led by Astanor, with existing investors UVC Partners, Inventure and Metaplanet taking part.
The Vilnius startup designs enzymes from the chemistry a customer needs, instead of starting from a natural enzyme and improving it. Its enzymes already sit inside products from global manufacturers, and it has delivered more than 50 custom enzymes to over 25 enterprise customers.
What the money will fund
The financing will fund a new 2,000 square metre design and testing facility in Vilnius, opening in 2027. The site will bring more of the build and test loop in house. Biomatter says its programs run in weeks today, and the new facility is meant to bring them down to days.
The round will also expand the commercial team and the company presence in the United States, where about half its customers are based. Biomatter will keep investing in its computational platform and in the enzyme dataset behind it.
Enzymes designed from the chemistry up
Most enzyme engineering starts with a natural enzyme and improves it step by step. Biomatter starts from the target reaction itself, the chemistry a customer product needs, and designs an enzyme for that job. The approach rests on years of generating its own enzyme data far from anything found in nature.
One program produced a methylase for mRNA vaccine manufacturing that works without SAM, an expensive additive every natural methylase depends on. Each design is tested in the lab before it ships to a customer.
Already inside real products
Biomatter work is already in products, including Thermo Fisher Scientific Invitrogen SuperScript V Reverse Transcriptase, an enzyme that converts RNA into DNA in molecular biology labs and mRNA research. Biomatter worked with the company to improve the enzyme oxidation resistance, part of the stability that supports ambient shipping and room temperature storage for up to six months.
A customer list that keeps growing
The company has delivered more than 50 custom enzymes to more than 25 enterprise customers across Europe, the United States and Japan. Named customers 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, which makes the next program faster and more accurate.
“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.”
Laurynas Karpus, CEO and co-founder of Biomatter
Astanor partner Harry Briggs said the field has been limited to training on what exists in nature, while Biomatter can “design enzymes that never evolved”. Biomatter was founded in 2018 in Vilnius. Its founders published one of the first demonstrations that generative models can produce working enzymes far from anything found in nature, in Nature Machine Intelligence in 2021. The company raised a 6.5 million euro seed round in 2024, led by Inventure and UVC Partners. You can follow this year AI funding rounds on our funding tracker.
