The timing couldn't have been more pointed. Just days after Generate Biomedicines made headlines with its public market debut, a Cardiff-based biotech called Antiverse quietly closed a $9.3 million Series A—and announced something that might matter more than the money.
On March 3, 2026, alongside the funding news, Antiverse unveiled a research partnership with the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation to design antibodies targeting CFTR, the protein at the heart of the disease. It's the kind of target that has stymied drug developers for years, and the collaboration suggests Antiverse believes its AI platform can crack problems the industry has largely sidestepped.
Whether that confidence proves justified remains an open question. But the company now has capital to find out.
The Harder Problem
Antiverse's pitch is straightforward, if ambitious: use artificial intelligence to design antibodies for targets drugmakers consider nearly impossible to hit. These aren't the well-trodden pathways of oncology or inflammatory disease. They're G-protein coupled receptors, ion channels, membrane proteins—structures that make up roughly 60% of known drug targets but resist conventional antibody development.
CFTR, the focus of the new partnership, exemplifies the challenge. The protein's extracellular region is notoriously difficult to target with biologics. Antiverse's approach involves generating epitope-specific antibody libraries using machine learning, then screening candidates in what the company calls a "lab-in-the-loop" workflow before handing off promising leads to the Foundation's labs for testing in native disease models.
It's a compressed timeline, too. The company claims it can deliver a functional binder in approximately six months—a cycle that, if repeatable across programs, would represent a meaningful acceleration over traditional discovery timelines. Perhaps more than the founders expected when they launched through the Deep Science Ventures accelerator in 2017.
The Money and the Model
Soulmates Ventures led the Series A, with participation from Innovation Investment Capital (the Cardiff Capital Region's venture fund), DOMiNO Ventures, and returning investors Development Bank of Wales, Kadmos Capital, and i&i Biotech Fund. The round brings Antiverse's total equity raised above $20 million since founding. The company didn't disclose valuation.
Development Bank of Wales has been a long-standing backer of Antiverse, a continuity that suggests sustained conviction in the platform. The Series A follows an October 2024 seed extension of £3.5 million (roughly $4.6 million) led by i&i Biotech Fund and Kadmos Capital.
Soulmates Ventures' decision to lead comes at a peculiar moment for AI-driven drug discovery. Public market appetite for the sector appears uncertain—Generate Biomedicines' February 28 debut offers a recent cautionary tale—yet pharma partnerships keep multiplying. BigHat Biosciences inked deals with Eli Lilly in January 2026. Absci continues building out its collaboration network. The disconnect between investor skepticism and pharma interest remains unresolved.
Building Beyond Cardiff
CEO Murat Tunaboylu and CTO Ben Holland founded Antiverse in 2017, initially operating from Cardiff University's sbarc|spark innovation hub. By October 2024, the company had expanded to Boston and Prague, a geographic footprint that reflects both U.S. pharma proximity and European talent access.
The platform itself combines AI-driven library generation with deep sequencing and what Antiverse describes as multiparameter clustering across approximately 20 properties. The company's partnerships tell a story of gradual validation: a deal with Nxera Pharma (formerly Sosei Heptares) focuses on GPCR-targeted antibodies; another with GlobalBio targets immune checkpoint inhibitors. Antiverse also references collaborations with "multiple top-20 global pharmaceutical companies," though it hasn't named them publicly.
It's a dual model, essentially—proprietary programs running alongside platform partnerships, each feeding the other. Revenue from partnerships funds internal pipeline development; successful internal candidates demonstrate platform capabilities to potential partners.
What Comes Next
Antiverse plans to deploy the Series A capital toward pushing lead antibody programs into in vivo efficacy studies while scaling platform capacity for partners. The Cystic Fibrosis Foundation partnership will serve as a high-profile test case, one with built-in visibility given the Foundation's stature and the disease's profile.
But the fundamental question lingers. Can AI antibody design consistently deliver against targets that have defeated traditional approaches? The field has attracted sustained pharma attention, yet clinical validation remains limited. Designing a binder in silico is one thing. Proving it works in patients is another entirely.
For now, Antiverse has runway and a foundation partnership that offers both validation and pressure. The company's bet is that truly undruggable targets aren't undruggable at all—just misunderstood. Whether that proves true will take more than six-month timelines to determine.
