CartaBio Secures Tens of Millions in RMB in Angel Funding Led by Lightsource Capital as Exclusive Financial Advisor and Industrial Incubator

Recently, CartaBio announced the completion of its tens-of-millions-of-yuan angel financing round. Investors in this round included Danen Capital, Coho Deeptech, and strategic industry investors. Lighthouse Capital served as the exclusive financial advisor and industry incubator for this financing round. The funds raised will be primarily used for team building, development of applications for the SAFE platform, upgrading and iterating its proprietary multimodal CellBERT large model platform, and promoting commercial adoption.

CartaBio is headquartered in Boston, USA. Its founding team comprises senior industry experts with interdisciplinary backgrounds in AI and bioinformatics, as well as renowned professors from top U.S. academic institutions. Team members primarily hail from organizations such as Johnson & Johnson, Harvard Medical School, Princeton University, and the University of Michigan. The company’s founder, Dr. Robert Yang, previously held positions at several leading multinational pharmaceutical corporations in the United States. With over 13 years of deep expertise in computational biology, he served as the Global Head of Data Science and Biomarkers at Johnson & Johnson, where he managed a global R&D team of 35 professionals, demonstrating robust R&D innovation capabilities and extensive management experience. Co-founder Professor Ralph Weissleder is a pioneer in the field of spatial multi-omics and a member of three U.S. national academies.

CartaBio holds exclusive licensing rights to the SAFE (scission-accelerated fluorophore exchange) spatial omics technology platform. This platform is a novel live-cell fluorescence imaging technology with spatiotemporal resolution, offering advantages such as high efficiency, rapid processing, non-toxicity, accurate quantification, and low cost. It enables simultaneous longitudinal analysis of multiple biomarkers in live cells or tissues. Compared to the first-generation technology, the SAFE platform reduces the required cell count by 100-fold, lowers costs by fivefold, and improves detection efficiency from weeks to just 1–2 days. Leveraging this platform, the company can generate large volumes of proprietary, differentiated cellular spatial datasets at low cost, while also expanding its applications in the fields of diagnosis and testing.

Furthermore, CartaBio has established CellBERT, the world’s first multimodal large model with cells as the fundamental unit, by integrating cell-centric data with spatial omics and non-spatial multi-omics data. This platform possesses self-learning capabilities for “cellular rules,” enabling the unified integration and processing of cell dictionaries, cell maps, and drug mechanisms.Compared with similar large language models, CellBERT achieves multimodal integration (including spatial omics data and other multi-omics cellular data), significantly enhances the scale of processable data, and possesses the capability to integrate data from different platforms, time spans, and spatial contexts. It can be widely applied in fields such as pharmaceuticals, synthetic biology, agricultural products, mass consumer goods, and scientific research and testing.

The company has secured order-based collaborations with multiple multinational pharmaceutical companies, including Sanofi, and has achieved preliminary commercial validation in the development of translational biomarkers and targets.Meanwhile, the company is collaborating with multiple multinational pharmaceutical corporations, research institutions, and university laboratories to actively expand its applications in the markets for pharmaceuticals, synthetic biology, diagnostics (early diagnosis and companion diagnostics), and scientific research.

Dr. Robert Yang, CEO of CartaBiostated: “We extend our heartfelt gratitude to Danen Capital, Coho Deeptech, and all investors participating in this financing round for their trust and support in the company’s future development. This funding will drive the iterative upgrade of our proprietary multimodal CellBERT large model platform, which is built upon data from CartaBio’s unique SAFE technology platform. Furthermore, it will further aid us in deciphering the mysteries of cells. We are fully confident in the technological potential of CartaBio, believing that it will not only bring transformative impact to the pharmaceutical industry but also break boundaries to be widely applied in multiple key areas related to human health and well-being, such as diagnostics and synthetic biology. Through our relentless efforts, we hope that CartaBio will make extensive and profound positive contributions to the future of humanity.”

Dr. Hong Lei, Executive Director and Head of Healthcare at Lighthouse Capital“Congratulations to the CartaBio team on completing their angel round of financing. The emergence of multi-omics technologies has enabled us to understand life from multiple dimensions, but it has also generated substantial data silos across platforms and spatiotemporal scales. Breakthroughs in AI technology are addressing this challenge. We observe that large AI models are exerting a disruptive impact on the application and understanding of complex diseases, pharmaceuticals, synthetic biology, and diagnostics. We are highly optimistic about the integration of multi-omics technologies with AI, and we strongly recognize Dr. Robert Yang and his team’s profound expertise and the broad market prospects in the field of AI-powered spatial multi-omics. Therefore, since the company’s inception, our team has been deeply involved throughout the project incubation process, providing comprehensive support to the CartaBio team in areas such as team building, fundraising, and industrial collaborations. We look forward to CartaBio leveraging its advantages in AI and spatial omics to drive breakthroughs and transformation in life science sectors, including pharmaceuticals, synthetic biology, diagnostics, and agriculture.”

Cao Yan, Partner at Danen Capital“Congratulations to the CartaBio team on completing their angel financing round. The challenge of life sciences, compared to other disciplines, lies in its experimental nature; it is a field with little theoretical guidance, where patterns must be discovered through experimentation. In other words, the principles of life sciences are not easily uncovered, and identifying correlations and causality from diverse and massive datasets has long been a significant challenge. Over the past two years, advancements in AI and life science tools have revealed the potential height that technology-enabled biology can reach and the profound impact it can have on the industry. We have consistently sought AI technologies that truly empower life sciences and models capable of addressing core challenges in the field. We are highly optimistic that Robert’s team will effectively integrate AI with multi-omics data to solve fundamental problems in pharmaceutical development. We also believe that Robert’s decade-plus experience at multinational corporations (MNCs), combined with his interdisciplinary background in life sciences and computer science, will drive breakthroughs in this domain.”

Rosanna Zhang, Head of Healthcare at Coho DeeptechHe stated, “CartaBio’s multi-omics and multiplex technologies enable us to gain deeper insights into patients and organ tissues, facilitating the discovery of new targets and precise analysis of the body’s response to drugs. The team brings together professors from top universities and experts from multinational pharmaceutical companies, forming a powerful alliance to advance drug development. We look forward to Carta’s growing influence in the industry, and Coho will assist it in establishing collaborations and connections with more pharmaceutical companies throughout this process.”