Aureka Biotechnologies Secures $10M Seed Funding to Revolutionize Large-Molecule Drug Discovery with AI and High-Throughput Digital Biology

Recently, Aureka Biotechnologies ("Aureka" for short) completed a multi-million-dollar seed round financing jointly invested by K2VC and New Alliance Capital. After this round of financing, Aureka will further accelerate the construction of its AI + high-throughput digital biotechnology macromolecule drug development platform and the research pace of seeking universal rules for drug design.

Source: Aureka

"We have addressed the pain points in the research and development of immunotherapies and macromolecular drugs, including bispecific antibodies, in an unprecedented way, improving R&D efficiency by several orders of magnitude compared to traditional methods," said Dr. Wei’an Zhao, CEO of Aureka. "Our technology platform can generate millions of data sets per experiment, covering various aspects such as the genetic sequence, functionality, high-content cellular images, and drug-likeness of candidate drugs. Through deep analysis and integration by our AI platform, new principles of drug discovery and drug design are revealed, further advancing the drug R&D process, shortening the time to market for drugs, and providing patients with higher-quality treatment options."

The uniqueness of Aureka's technology platform lies in its reliance on high-throughput single B-cell functional screening technology, protein rapid evolution technology based on synthetic biology, combined with structure-inspired AI modeling and design technology, creating a data-driven dry-wet closed-loop intelligent immunotherapy discovery platform, thereby significantly enhancing the precision and efficiency of drug development. In just two months, Aureka successfully completed the entire process from design, synthesis, expression, screening to characterization, and screened more than 100 functional bispecific antibody molecules from millions of possibilities, some of which even outperformed the positive drugs currently in clinical trials in terms of functionality. This achievement has already been published in 'Nature Communications Biology》has been published. Now, the collaboration pipeline based on this project has entered the IND-enabling stage.

Fig.｜A high throughput bispecific antibody discovery pipeline, Nature Communications Biology

Dr. Weian Zhao"Aureka's technology platform is mainly used to accelerate the research and development process of bispecific antibodies, TCR-T, CAR-T, ADC, and other difficult-to-drug target therapies. With the continuous expansion of the large molecule drug market, we firmly believe that Aureka's technology will enable drug developers to discover new large molecule drugs faster and better, meeting patients' needs for disease treatment." Aureka has conducted pilot projects with some multinational pharmaceutical companies, achieving results beyond expectations and validating the strong potential of its technology platform. "We look forward to more partners joining us to drive rapid progress in drug development, thereby better meeting the needs of society and patients."

Dr. Wang Yunhai, Managing Partner of Xianfeng QiyunStated: "With the continuous development and integration of multidisciplinary technologies such as artificial intelligence, microfluidics, imaging, and synthetic biology, the efficiency of drug discovery is expected to achieve a leapfrog breakthrough. The Aureka team possesses a strong interdisciplinary background and international perspective, having established a high-throughput single B-cell functional screening platform and a synthetic biology protein rapid evolution platform. Combined with AI technology, these form a dry-wet closed loop for large molecule drug research and development, with the platform already gaining preliminary validation. We are highly optimistic about Aureka's development prospects, with potential future applications expanding into areas such as large molecule drug R&D, peptide, enzyme, and other protein product development."

Xianghong Lin, Founding Partner of New Alliance Capital"Biomedicine industry has long been plagued by pain points such as long R&D cycles, high costs, high failure rates, and insufficient underlying innovation capabilities. Aureka aims to significantly increase the success rate of discovering clinical candidate drug molecules by combining the world's most advanced AI computing tools with a unique wet lab platform, thereby substantially lowering the threshold for drug development and addressing more unmet clinical needs. Relying on the years of technical accumulation by Professor Wei-An Zhao and multiple top industry experts, the company’s professional team will continuously strive to achieve this long-term vision. As a newly established industry-finance integrated fund management platform, Nueli Capital combines investment and industry operation experience from top-tier investment institutions and industry leaders. We are highly confident in Aureka’s future and look forward to collaborating on more partnerships to contribute to the internationalization of innovative biopharmaceutical products."

Aureka is a platform-based biotechnology company that combines AI technology with high-throughput digital biotechnology, focusing on protein design and immunotherapy drug discovery. Our goal is to transform the drug R&D model, improve the efficiency of drug development, reduce R&D costs and risks, meet clinical needs, and enable more effective treatment options to benefit patients sooner. In early 2023, amidst a capital winter, Aureka successfully completed a multi-million-dollar seed funding round jointly invested by K2VC and New Alliance Capital.

K2 Venture Partners was founded in 2016 as an early-stage venture capital fund focused on life sciences and healthcare. We target platform-type opportunities with immense potential, committed to becoming the entrepreneurial partner of top founders while continuously empowering them before and after investment. Managing dual-currency funds in both RMB and USD, K2 Venture Partners has systematically invested in cutting-edge fields such as gene therapy, gene editing, RNAi, mRNA, circular RNA, antibody-drug conjugates, bispecific antibodies, and surgical robotics.

Newley Capital is an investment and fund management platform that collaborates with top-tier domestic and international industrial resources and long-term capital. It features three interconnected capabilities: fund-of-funds, direct investment, and secondary private equity investment, while being driven by both onshore RMB and offshore USD. The firm focuses on sectors such as healthcare, semiconductors and smart manufacturing, new energy and carbon neutrality, and consumer technology.