Biomatter, the custom enzyme design company, announced the closing of an oversubscribed $18 million Series A financing led by Astanor, with participation from existing investors UVC Partners, Inventure, and Metaplanet.

Biomatter’s work is already in products, including Thermo Fisher Scientific’s Invitrogen™ SuperScript™ V Reverse Transcriptase, an enzyme used to convert RNA into DNA in molecular biology labs and mRNA research. Biomatter collaborated with the company to enhance the enzyme’s oxidation resistance, part of the reagent stability that supports ambient shipping and room-temperature storage for up to six months.

The financing will fund a new 2,000 m² (roughly 21,500 sq ft) design-and-testing facility in Vilnius, opening in 2027, which will bring more of the build-and-test loop in-house. Conventional enzyme programs take months or years. Biomatter’s programs run weeks, and the new facility is meant to bring them to days. The round will also expand the commercial team and the company’s US presence, where roughly half its customers are based, and continue investment in the computational platform and the enzyme dataset behind it.

“Our goal is to make a custom enzyme as easy to order as a catalog product, including for reactions that don’t have one today,” said Laurynas Karpus, CEO and co-founder of Biomatter. “This funding round lets us design enzymes from the chemistry up at a larger scale and get them into customers’ products faster.”

Biomatter designs enzymes from the target reaction, the chemistry a customer’s product needs, rather than from a starting natural enzyme and the natural data around it. That approach rests on years of generating its own enzyme data far from anything in nature, which is what lets Biomatter’s models make large jumps in sequence and structure. One program produced a methylase for mRNA vaccine manufacturing that works without SAM, an expensive additive every natural methylase depends on. That is not a better version of something that already existed. It is a chemical reaction nature doesn’t perform. Each design is tested in the lab before it ships.

“AI is moving out of software and into the physical world, and biology is where that shift is accelerating,” said Oliver Schoppe, Partner, UVC Partners. “Most companies working on AI for biology are still proving it works. Biomatter’s enzymes are already in products shipping from some of the largest manufacturers in Europe and the United States, which is why we increased our investment in this round.”

Biomatter has delivered more than 50 custom enzymes to more than 25 enterprise customers spanning Europe, the United States, and Japan. They include AstraZeneca, BASF, Kirin Holdings, Neogen, Sanofi, and Tereos, working across biopharma, diagnostics, agriculture, and industrial biotech. Several accounts have grown from a single project into multi-year, multi-enzyme programs. Each program also adds to a proprietary dataset of experimentally characterized enzymes that makes the next program faster and more accurate.

“Enzymes power hundreds of billions of dollars in food production and biomanufacturing. But because improving them takes months or years of trial and error, companies settle for suboptimal enzymes,” said Harry Briggs, Partner, Astanor. “The constraint has been data. Until now, the field has been limited to training on what exists in nature. Biomatter has spent years generating data beyond nature, which allows them to design enzymes that never evolved. They have world-class customers returning again and again, across an array of industries. That is the clearest signal there is.”