Biomatter Closes €16.2M to Scale Enzyme Design

The big picture: Vilnius-based Biomatter closed an oversubscribed €16.2 million Series A financing. The company designs novel, high-performance enzymes using an AI-first platform for biopharma, diagnostics, agriculture, and industrial BioTech.

Why it matters:

• Accelerated Development: Biomatter’s AI- and physics-driven platform significantly reduces enzyme development timelines from months or years to weeks, with plans to further reduce this to days.
• Beyond Nature: The company designs enzymes from target reactions, enabling the creation of novel catalysts that do not exist in nature, such as a methylase for mRNA vaccine manufacturing that operates without expensive additives.
• Industry Impact: Its custom enzymes are already integrated into products for major enterprise customers like Thermo Fisher Scientific, AstraZeneca, BASF, and Sanofi, addressing critical needs across diverse industries.

How it works:

• Intelligent Architecture Platform: Biomatter utilizes a proprietary AI-first platform built on years of generating its own enzyme data, allowing its models to make significant jumps in sequence and structure design.
• Chemistry-Up Design: Instead of modifying existing natural enzymes, the company designs enzymes directly from the target chemical reaction required by a customer’s product.
• Iterative Data Generation: Each customer program contributes to a growing proprietary dataset of experimentally characterized enzymes, continuously improving the speed and accuracy of subsequent designs.

The catch: The enzyme engineering market is becoming increasingly competitive, with other startups also leveraging AI and computational methods to accelerate discovery. While Biomatter’s ‘beyond nature’ approach offers a distinct advantage, maintaining this lead will require continuous innovation in its platform and data generation, especially as larger players or well-funded competitors enter the space. Scaling a new 2,000 m² facility and expanding commercially will also require significant operational execution.

Key Facts

• Company: Biomatter
• Amount: €16.2M
• Round: Series A
• Investors: Astanor (lead), UVC Partners, Inventure, Metaplanet
• Founders: Donatas Repečka, Laurynas Karpus, Rolandas Meškys, Vykintas Jauniskis
• Sector: Custom Enzyme Design
• Headquarters: Vilnius, Lithuania