Lithuanian biotechnology company Biomatter has closed an oversubscribed $18 million Series A round to build a new facility in Vilnius and grow its commercial team, with the financing led by Astanor and backed by existing investors UVC Partners, Inventure, and Metaplanet.
Biomatter, which uses artificial intelligence to design custom enzymes from target chemical reactions rather than from naturally occurring starting points, will use the capital to open a 2,000 square metre design-and-testing facility in Vilnius in 2027. The company says the new site will bring more of its build-and-test process in-house and reduce enzyme development cycles from weeks to days, compared with the months or years typical of conventional approaches.
The round will also fund an expansion of Biomatter’s commercial team and its presence in the United States, where roughly half its customers are based, as well as continued development of its computational platform and proprietary enzyme dataset. The company has delivered more than 50 custom enzymes to more than 25 enterprise customers across Europe, the United States, and Japan, including AstraZeneca, BASF, Kirin Holdings, Neogen, Sanofi, and Tereos.
Biomatter’s enzymes are already incorporated into commercial products, among them Thermo Fisher Scientific’s Invitrogen SuperScript V Reverse Transcriptase, where Biomatter worked to improve the enzyme’s oxidation resistance to support ambient shipping and room-temperature storage for up to six months. The company also developed a methylase for mRNA vaccine manufacturing that functions without SAM, an expensive additive that all naturally occurring methylases require.
The Vilnius facility will add to a biotechnology cluster that already includes Thermo Fisher Scientific’s life sciences research and manufacturing operations, Northway Biotech’s biologics services, Caszyme in CRISPR gene editing, and Pentasweet, which is developing a brazzein sweet protein production plant in Vilnius with total investment expected to reach 65 million euros across two phases.
Source: investlithuania.com
