Aureka Biotechnologies Completes $35M Series A+ Financing, First AI-Designed Antibody Drug Set for Clinical Trials

Text｜Hu Xiangyun

Editor｜Hai Ruojing

36Kr has learned that Aureka Biotechnologies has recently completed a US$35 million Series A+ financing round. This round was led by HongShan, with participation from Matrix Partners China and BioTrack Capital, while existing shareholders Morningside Ventures, Qiming Venture Partners, and NRL Capital continued to increase their investments.

At the end of last year, Aureka Biotechnologies, Inc. received tens of millions of dollars in funding.Series A FinancingAs of now, the cumulative amount of Company A's financing in the A-round has approached 100 million US dollars.

Xunming Shengke stated that the proceeds from this round of financing will be used to promote the construction of its self-developed innovative functional antibody design platform AuraIDE™, enhance the development of foundational models and agent capabilities, improve high-throughput and high-content experimental platform facilities, and further streamline the key processes for agents from project initiation, molecular design to commercial application.

In the three years since its establishment in 2023, Xunming Biotech has completed the progression from building a generative antibody drug R&D platform and promoting the deep involvement of intelligent agents in drug molecule design and development, to scaling up this capability. Zhao Wei'an, founder and CEO of Xunming Biotech, believes that the new challenge facing the company now is how to create "matching infrastructure for this system, thereby accelerating the process of validating the actual effects of new targets and new molecules designed by intelligent agents. This directly impacts the commercialization ability of AI-driven pharmaceutical enterprises."

In Zhao Wei'an's view, the reason why general large model manufacturers are stronger lies in their long-term construction of infrastructure capabilities, which can quickly verify innovative value and form real feedback. However, in the pharmaceutical industry, the traditional drug research and development verification cycle often lasts 5-10 years. Under this logic, it would lead to the model lacking effective feedback for a long time and iteration distortion.

Therefore, Aureka hopes to combine its early-stage wet lab platform capabilities to build a set of infrastructure that can form a rapid iterative feedback loop with large biotechnology models, providing a more efficient evaluation model for the model's "progress." This system is mainly composed of three parts:

Firstly, at the biochemical level. According to reports, in standard target molecule design, Aureka's delivery efficiency is "about 50% higher" than traditional wet lab experiments, compressing the validation cycle to around 3 weeks.

Next is the infrastructure for functional antibody design at the cellular function level. Zhao Wei'an believes that this is also Xunming Life Sciences' core advantage at this stage. "The ultimate value of a drug lies in its functional molecules, but most companies only focus on binding issues when designing molecules. In contrast, we rely on a high-throughput microfluidic system to characterize complex drug functions such as agonistic activity, endocytosis, and blood-brain barrier penetration, which are difficult to assess quickly using traditional experimental methods. Moreover, these evaluations can generally be completed within six weeks."

Finally, it comes down to the level of commercially tradable drug pipeline data packages. Currently, Aureka can complete the delivery of a full set of commercial data packages, including somatic cells, mice, pre-CMC, and pre-toxicology, within 9-12 months from project initiation.

Wei'an Zhao admitted that as a startup mainly relying on BD transactions to achieve a commercial closed loop, the ability to "rapidly deliver differentiated functional new molecules" is a key bargaining chip when negotiating partnerships with multinational pharmaceutical companies and other buyers.

"We judge that in the future of new drug development, about 90% of the demand will focus on the development of special functional molecules that are difficult to achieve with traditional methods. Therefore, we are focusing on two categories: First, target research that cannot be completed by traditional animal immunization and library screening; second, for known mature targets, we mainly focus on areas where there are already marketed drugs but unmet clinical needs exist (such as insufficient efficacy, toxicity, off-target issues, etc.), and which are difficult to address with traditional research methods."

For example, in collaboration with a TOP 5 multinational pharmaceutical company, Aureka completed the development of three traditionally difficult drug target projects within two months for the partner. One of these included a GPCR (G-protein-coupled receptor) target product. Such targets are expressed in low quantities on cell membranes and involve complex conformational regulation, making it difficult to prepare qualified immunogens through traditional immunization methods, thus posing challenges in developing corresponding drugs. However, by utilizing its functional screening platform combined with intelligent agents, Aureka can directly screen functional molecules in the natural cellular environment in one step, completing project delivery.

It is reported that in the past two years, Aureka has reached BD or NewCo cooperation with multiple multinational pharmaceutical companies and investment institutions, achieving tens of millions of dollars in revenue.

In addition, in terms of self-developed pipelines, Aureka Biotechnologies mainly focuses on three major disease areas: cardiovascular metabolism, immunity, and the central nervous system. Currently, there are eight pipelines under research, two of which are expected to enter the clinical application stage by the end of this year and officially start the first human clinical trial in the first quarter of next year. Another four projects will complete the PCC (Preclinical Candidate Compound) stage by the end of this year.

"We are one of the few companies in the industry that can prove our core pipeline is entirely designed by intelligent agents, and we can fully present the raw data to demonstrate that the improvement in biological foundational model capabilities directly corresponds to an increase in drug value. For primary market investors, this is a significant trait, indicating that a company may have stronger growth potential, which also gives us considerable valuation premium space," said Zhao Wei'an.