ALLOX raises $10.5M seed to map drug pockets on hard-to-target proteins
A Barcelona spin-out of the CRG closes a $10.5M seed led by Asabys, with CDTI and the Institut Català de Finances, to find drug pockets on hard-to-target proteins.
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Barcelona, Spain
ALLOX, a Barcelona spin-out of the Centre for Genomic Regulation, has raised a $10.5M seed round led by Asabys to scale a platform that finds drug-binding sites on proteins conventional methods struggle to reach.
Below, I walk through the round, the science behind it and the market it targets.
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Asabys leads, CDTI and the Institut Català de Finances follow
Tech.eu reported on October 29, 2026 that ALLOX closed a $10.5M seed financing, about €9.4M according to Dealroom. Asabys led through its Sabadell Asabys II fund. CDTI, the Spanish public agency for industrial technology, invested through its SICC Innvierte vehicle, and the Institut Català de Finances joined the round.
The money goes into four areas, according to Tech.eu: expanding the platform, building proprietary AI models that predict therapeutic opportunities from large-scale biophysical datasets, growing the internal drug discovery team, and moving multiple research programs toward proprietary small-molecule candidates. ALLOX also plans research collaborations with pharma and biotech partners. Morten Graugaard, formerly of Novo Holdings and Lundbeck, joins as independent chair of the board.
The investors know the company well. The pre-seed announced in December 2023 came from the same Sabadell Asabys II fund, and CDTI committed €1.8M through Innvierte in September 2024, according to its press release.
One experiment, up to a million mutant proteins
ALLOX (legal name Allostery Exploration Technologies) is based in Barcelona, with Júlia Domingo as CEO and co-founder. Her co-founders are Ben Lehner, Pablo Baeza and Andre Faure, per the 2023 incorporation announcement from the Barcelona Institute of Science and Technology (BIST). Lehner leads Generative Genomics at the Wellcome Sanger Institute, according to StartupRise.
The platform combines high-throughput genetics, experimental biology and AI. It measures the effects of thousands of mutations in parallel to map the regions that shape how a protein folds and interacts, according to Tech.eu. At incorporation, the company described its method as measuring the activity of up to 1 million mutant versions of a protein in a single experiment (BIST, December 2023). The targets sit among protein-protein interactions and transcription factors, which are hard to address with conventional methods, and Dealroom lists cancer, immune and inflammatory diseases as the first focus areas.
Dealroom counts 15 people at ALLOX and notes the company recently doubled its lab space. It also notes that ALLOX has not yet shown clinical or commercial validation, and Tech.eu names no individual programs.
A $4.38 billion European market growing 22% a year
Towards Healthcare valued European AI in drug discovery at $4.38 billion in 2025 and forecasts $32.26 billion by 2035, a 22.1% CAGR (May 2026). Syndicated forecasts like this vary widely between publishers, so the figure is best read as a direction of travel.
At about €9.4M, this seed sits below the $18M seed that Undecimal Bio raised on October 13 and well below the €25M first close behind Samplix this week. Both rounds are in our fundraising data next to the rest of this year’s European biotech deals.
Three kinds of Catalan money in one round
Dealroom reports that Catalan health-tech raised a record €517M in 2025, including €347M for biotech. ALLOX shows how that money stacks up: a regional lender in the Institut Català de Finances, a national agency in CDTI and a specialist fund in Asabys, all in the same round.
Domingo framed the starting point at incorporation: “A large portion of the therapeutic space is currently considered undruggable.” That is the hard fact. The good news is that the tools to test it now exist, since one experiment can score up to a million variants of a protein. Clara Campàs, Managing Partner at Asabys, put the bet in one line: “We believe ALLOX is uniquely positioned to expand the scope of druggable biology.” What to watch is which programs ALLOX names first and which pharma partners sign the first collaborations.
Europe has the labs, the public agencies and the specialist funds to turn a lab method into a company. Let’s keep building the ones that connect them!
