Biomatter lands $18M to speed up enzyme development with AI

Biomatter, a company specialising in custom enzyme design, has raised $18 million in an oversubscribed Series A funding round led by Astanor, with participation from existing investors UVC Partners, Inventure and Metaplanet. Biomatter develops computational technology to design enzymes tailored to specific chemical reactions and industrial applications. Rather than modifying existing natural enzymes, the company focuses on creating enzymes based on the chemistry required for a particular process. Enzymes play an important role in industries such as pharmaceuticals, diagnostics, agriculture and industrial biotechnology. However, conventional enzyme development can take months or even years, particularly when naturally occurring enzymes are unsuitable for specific applications. To address these challenges, Biomatter combines computational models with laboratory testing to develop enzymes with properties suited to customers' requirements. Its technology draws on a proprietary dataset of e