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Biomatter raises $18 million to expand AI enzyme design

Biomatter has closed an $18 million Series A led by Astanor. The company plans a new design-and-testing facility in Vilnius and an expansion of its US presence.

AI.info Team · · fact-checked · against 6 sources ↓ · Published 12 Nov 2026

Biomatter has raised $18 million to expand its AI-powered enzyme design business, including a planned laboratory facility in Vilnius and a larger US presence. In a financing announcement on November 12, the company said Astanor led the Series A, with existing investors UVC Partners, Inventure and Metaplanet also participating.

The round was oversubscribed. Biomatter designs custom enzymes for customers in fields including biopharma, diagnostics, agriculture and industrial biotechnology.

Plans for a new facility

The financing will fund a 2,000 m² (roughly 21,500 sq ft) design-and-testing facility in Vilnius, scheduled to open in 2027. The site is intended to bring more of the enzyme build-and-test process in-house.

Biomatter says its programs currently run for weeks, compared with months or years for conventional enzyme programs. It aims to bring its own cycles down to days with the new facility.

The company also plans to expand its commercial team and its US presence, and to continue investing in its computational platform and enzyme dataset. Roughly half its customers are based in the United States, according to the announcement.

In August 2024, Biomatter closed a €6.5 million seed round jointly led by Inventure and UVC Partners. The company was founded in 2018.

Designing for a reaction

Biomatter says its approach starts with the chemical reaction a customer's product needs, rather than a naturally occurring enzyme. Its models draw on enzyme data the company has generated, and each design is tested in a laboratory before shipment.

One program produced a methylase for mRNA vaccine manufacturing that works without SAM, an expensive additive that natural methylases depend on, the company says.

Chief executive and co-founder Laurynas Karpus said the company's goal is to make ordering a custom enzyme as straightforward as ordering a catalog product, including for reactions without an existing option. He said the funding would let Biomatter design enzymes at a larger scale and get them into customers' products faster.

Customers and products

The company says it has delivered more than 50 custom enzymes to more than 25 enterprise customers across Europe, the United States and Japan. Those customers include AstraZeneca, BASF, Kirin Holdings, Neogen, Sanofi and Tereos; some accounts have grown from one project into multi-year programs involving multiple enzymes.

Biomatter says its work is already part of Thermo Fisher Scientific's Invitrogen SuperScript V Reverse Transcriptase, which converts RNA into DNA for molecular biology laboratories and mRNA research. The companies collaborated to improve the enzyme's resistance to oxidation, contributing to reagent stability that supports ambient shipping and room-temperature storage for up to six months.

In August 2025, Neogen disclosed an arrangement with Biomatter to develop new enzyme-based products using the latter's Intelligent Architecture platform and Neogen's analytical development and technology expertise. The platform combines AI and physical modeling, according to Neogen.