Zafrens provides a platform that allows scientists to create and test hundreds of thousands of potential medicines in a single experiment. The company has demonstrated the value of its platform through collaborations with several pharmaceutical companies across multiple drug classes. Led by CEO Swamy Vijayan, Zafrens focuses on accelerating drug discovery via its high-throughput experimental platform. The new funding will enable the company to expand its capacity. Zafrens also plans to engage in additional partnerships with pharmaceutical companies worldwide. To date, the company has raised a total of USD 31m. Zafrens is a multi-modality drug discovery company commercializing the Z-Screen™ platform, which scales conventional 96-well experiments to 50,000–200,000 wells with integrated imaging and single-cell multi-omic capabilities. The platform resolves complex cellular co-culture interactions at molecular and functional levels, enabling mapping of large CRISPR, CAR-T, mRNA libraries and endogenous heterogeneity to cell behavior, interactions, and secretions. By combining simultaneous functional and molecular profiling with very large chemical libraries, Zafrens aims to reveal hits, structure–activity relationships, and mechanisms of action in a single experiment, compressing multiple traditional discovery stages. The company is advancing an internal pipeline focused on RNA-modulatory small molecules and HLA-agnostic TCR libraries to common cancer mutations and has demonstrated capabilities in CAR-T optimization and bi-specific antibody discovery. Zafrens seeks partnerships in areas where combinatorial libraries of small molecules, genetic perturbations, and cell–cell interactions could produce breakthroughs and expects its high-resolution datasets to inform drug design and patient selection. Financially, Zafrens closed $23 million in financing to optimize the Z-Screen platform and advance its internal pipeline; the company is based in San Diego, CA.

Total raised

$54M

Funding rounds

2

Latest round

Series A

Latest activity

Feb 2025