Biomatter Closes Oversubscribed $18M Series A to Build AI Enzyme Labs

Biomatter has closed an oversubscribed $18 million Series A led by Astanor, with participation from existing investors UVC Partners, Inventure and Metaplanet, the company announced on November 12, 2026. The money will fund an expanded AI-powered enzyme-design operation, a larger commercial team and a stronger US presence.

The centerpiece of the plan is concrete: a 2,000-square-meter design-and-testing facility in Vilnius, scheduled to open in 2027. That footprint — roughly the size of a small supermarket — will bring enzyme building and testing in-house. The round will also pay for further development of the computational platform and its underlying enzyme dataset.

How Fast Can Enzyme Design Get?

Biomatter claims conventional enzyme development takes months or years; its current programs run in weeks. The new laboratory capacity is meant to compress that cycle to days. The company has not yet demonstrated the day-cycle target in practice, so the claim remains a plan rather than a result.

The facility's purpose is to connect computational design with the experimental testing needed to turn candidate enzymes into deliverable products. Every design is tested in the laboratory before shipment, according to the company.

CEO and co-founder Laurynas Karpus framed the ambition in one line: "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." That promise implies a level of standardization the company has not fully reached; today, each enzyme still requires laboratory validation.

Designing From the Target Reaction

Biomatter's process starts with the chemistry a customer's product needs, rather than with a natural enzyme and the data around it. The company says years of generating enzyme data far from natural examples allow its models to make large jumps in sequence and structure.

The proof cases are specific. In a collaboration with Thermo Fisher Scientific, Biomatter worked on Invitrogen SuperScript V Reverse Transcriptase, an enzyme used to convert RNA into DNA in molecular biology labs and mRNA research. Biomatter reports the work improved oxidation resistance, supporting reagent stability that allows ambient shipping and room-temperature storage for up to six months — a meaningful shift for products that typically demand cold chains.

In another program, Biomatter created a methylase enzyme for mRNA vaccine manufacturing that works without SAM. The company describes SAM as an expensive additive required by every natural methylase, and presents the project as a chemical reaction that nature does not perform.

Who Buys, and What They Generate?

The commercial record is the round's strongest evidence. Biomatter reports delivering more than 50 custom enzymes to over 25 enterprise customers across Europe, the United States and Japan. Named customers include AstraZeneca, BASF, Kirin Holdings, Neogen, Sanofi and Tereos — spanning biopharma, diagnostics, agriculture and industrial biotechnology. Roughly half of its customers are US-based, and several accounts have grown from single projects into multi-year, multi-enzyme programs.

Each program adds experimentally characterized enzymes to Biomatter's proprietary dataset, which the company says makes subsequent programs faster and more accurate. Customer projects and the new laboratory therefore serve a shared function: one generates data, the other expands the capacity to test designs at scale.

Astanor partner Harry Briggs tied the investment case directly to that loop — data generation beyond natural examples plus repeat customer projects across industries. His rationale links the technical platform to evidence of commercial adoption, rather than treating revenue and data development as separate activities.

The financing now makes laboratory throughput central to Biomatter's next stage. Whether more in-house testing can actually shorten development cycles to days, while sustaining the custom, laboratory-validated work behind its growing customer base, is the operational question the Vilnius facility must answer.