Participated · Equity · Oct 2025

iOrganBio is a 2024-founded biotech company leveraging its proprietary CellForge™ platform to industrialize the production of human cells and organoids for drug discovery, regenerative medicine, and cell therapies. CellForge integrates AI-based predictive modeling with high-throughput, closed-loop control of 3D culture environments to optimize human pluripotent stem cell differentiation in real time. Central to the system is the Functional Human CellAtlas™, a growing single-cell multi-omics database that serves as a digital blueprint for engineering targeted cell states. Early applications include generating pancreas models with tailored vasculature and immune competency by selectively producing beta islet cells. The company addresses key industry bottlenecks—definability, generalizability, adaptability, reproducibility, and scalability—to deliver reproducible and cost-effective cell manufacturing. iOrganBio is headquartered at BioLabs in Chapel Hill, NC and currently operates with $2 million in initial capital; no revenue or user metrics were disclosed.

Participated · Series B · May 2024

Elegen develops cell-free, microfluidics-based DNA synthesis and production technologies and markets the ENFINIA DNA product line for research and clinical workflows. The platform emphasizes longer, more complex, and faster DNA synthesis compared with traditional cell-based cloning, aiming to reduce synthesis failures, contamination, and hands-on time. Elegen commercialized ENFINIA DNA in Q1 2023, introduced higher-scale synthesis options in early Q4 2023, and in March launched a service for rapid synthesis of highly complex sequences. The company is focused on providing turnkey production of GMP-compliant DNA to support discovery and clinical development of genetic medicines. Recent plans supported by the financing include development of IVT-ready DNA, plasmid DNA and clinical-grade DNA production across clinical manufacturing workflows. Elegen also has a strategic collaboration with GSK to apply its cell-free DNA manufacturing technology to vaccines and medicines.

Participated · Equity · Dec 2023

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.

Participated · Series A · Aug 2023

Chemify is a Glasgow-based deep-tech company that integrates artificial intelligence, advanced robotics, and a large vetted reaction library to design and synthesize novel molecules directly from digital code. Its core Chemputation platform enables closed-loop, automated structure–activity relationship exploration, allowing rapid generation of drug-like compounds with high potency. Current work focuses on partnering with drug discovery groups such as Lgenia to create small-molecule therapeutics for infectious diseases, notably tuberculosis. By turning chemistry into a programmable workflow, Chemify aims to shorten the time from concept to validated lead and to scale digital chemistry for medicines and advanced materials. The company was founded by chemist Lee Cronin and positions itself as a partner for pharmaceutical R&D teams seeking speed and reproducibility. Financially, Chemify has secured $3.2 million in non-dilutive grant funding from the Gates Foundation across two tranches, including a recent $1.6 million follow-on award, to advance its tuberculosis program.

Participated · Series A · Jul 2022

Xilis develops the MicroOrganoSphere™ (MOS™) technology, a scalable, high-throughput patient-derived model that recapitulates tumor microenvironment and immune interactions for precision oncology and drug discovery. The MOS platform is designed to guide clinicians in treatment decisions and to accelerate biopharma R&D and drug development. Xilis is building AI-driven algorithms, including a Xilis Response Score™, to enable timely, informed treatment selection in the clinic. The company says MOS is the first end-to-end platform capable of capturing tumor heterogeneity at scale and enabling next-generation immuno-oncology and cell therapy discovery. Xilis will use the Series A proceeds to advance and expand its proprietary MOS platform across clinical diagnostics and partnered drug discovery efforts. The company is based in Durham, North Carolina, and has recently participated in the Oncode-PACT Consortium and was featured as the cover article in Cell Stem Cell. Xilis’s core product is the MicroOrganoSphere (MOS) technology: miniature patient-derived tumor models that capture tumor heterogeneity and the native microenvironment. Using MOS plus AI-driven algorithms, Xilis is developing a Precision Oncology Platform and a Xilis Response Score to help clinicians prioritize therapies, with a turnaround from biopsy to results in under two weeks. The MOS platform also targets pharmaceutical applications across discovery, preclinical toxicity and efficacy testing, bioanalytical assays, and clinical trial support, including immunotherapy development that requires intact immune microenvironments. Xilis plans to expand its AI capabilities, advance diagnostic clinical studies, and validate MOS use with biopharma partners. The company emphasizes an automated, scalable solution to speed patient-specific therapeutic profiling and drug development. Xilis has developed a microfluidics-based process that cultivates and sustains thousands of micro-tumors from a single patient biopsy to test which cancer treatments will or won’t work. The founders, Duke University researchers Xiling Shen and Dr. David Hsu, advanced work based on Hans Clevers’s organoid research; Clevers has joined as a co-founder. The company reports creating 10,000 micro-tumors from a single biopsy and says its technology is already in clinical trials with data showing it can predict treatment success and find therapies for drug-resistant patients. Xilis is also building a micro-organoid bank that it expects pharma companies will use for large-scale drug screening. To accelerate commercialization and shorten time-to-clinic, Xilis has raised external capital and is positioning the platform as a lower-cost, higher-throughput alternative for early drug testing. The company emphasizes both near-term clinical decision support and longer-term value from the datasets it is assembling.