Biomatter raises $18M Series A to design custom enzymes with AI
Vilnius-based Biomatter raised an oversubscribed $18M Series A led by Astanor to open a 2,000 square meter enzyme design lab in 2027 and grow its US presence.
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Founded 2018 · Vilnius, Lithuania
Vilnius-based Biomatter raised an oversubscribed $18M Series A led by Astanor, with UVC Partners, Inventure and Metaplanet investing again, to build an enzyme design and testing facility in Vilnius, grow its US presence and keep training the AI platform behind its enzymes.
Designing an enzyme for a new reaction still takes weeks of back and forth between model and bench, by Biomatter’s own account. And yet a team in Lithuania has put AstraZeneca, BASF and Sanofi on its customer list while working inside that constraint.
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Astanor leads an oversubscribed round from Vilnius
Biomatter announced the $18M Series A on 12 November 2026 in a Business Wire release dated from Vilnius. The Next Web and Tech Funding News covered it the same day. Astanor led, and existing investors UVC Partners, Inventure and Metaplanet came back in. The company describes the round as oversubscribed and did not disclose a valuation.
The money goes to three things, in the company’s words. First, a 2,000 square meter design and testing facility in Vilnius, opening in 2027, built to cut design-to-lab cycles from weeks to days. Second, a larger commercial team and a stronger US presence. Third, continued investment in the computational platform and its enzyme dataset.
“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.
AstraZeneca, BASF and Sanofi on a Lithuanian order book
Founded in 2018, according to the release, Biomatter designs custom enzymes from the chemistry up: its AI platform starts from the reaction a customer needs and designs the protein to run it. Its founders published their generative-model approach to enzyme design in Nature Machine Intelligence in 2021.
In its release, Biomatter reports delivering more than 50 custom enzymes to more than 25 enterprise customers in Europe, the US and Japan. The named customers are AstraZeneca, BASF, Kirin Holdings, Neogen, Sanofi and Tereos. It helped Thermo Fisher Scientific make its Invitrogen SuperScript V reverse transcriptase more resistant to oxidation. It also claims a methylase for mRNA vaccine manufacturing that does not need SAM (S-adenosylmethionine), per The Next Web.
About half of those customers are in the US, according to the company. That is where the new commercial hires are pointed. A company built in Vilnius already sells to American buyers at that share, and the round now pays to sit closer to them.
A $3.3B enzyme market growing 11.6 percent a year
Grand View Research, as cited by Tech Funding News on 12 November 2026, puts the global engineered enzymes market at $3.3B in 2026 and $7.3B by 2033, an 11.6 percent CAGR. That figure includes non-AI approaches. It sizes the whole field Biomatter sells into, with no split for AI-designed enzymes.
The competitive set Tech Funding News lists runs from seed to Series B. Imperagen in Manchester raised a £5M seed in May 2026, led by PXN Ventures. ZYMVOL in Spain raised a €3M seed in February 2025, led by Faber Ventures. Cradle in Amsterdam raised a $73M Series B in November 2024, led by IVP. Biomatter’s $18M sits between the seed-stage teams and Cradle.
For scale, two larger rounds Sesamers covered this month: Oyster Therapeutics’ $60M Series A, led by 4BIO Capital, and T-Therapeutics’ $133M Series B, backed by Advent Life Sciences and the British Business Bank. The rest of this year’s European rounds sit in our fundraising data.
An agrifood fund writes the lead ticket in a chemistry round
The investor line-up is the part I find most telling. Astanor, founded in 2017, has made about 50 agrifood tech investments, according to Tech Funding News. UVC Partners manages over €800M and has backed Isar Aerospace, Proxima Fusion, Q.ANT and Aleph Alpha, per the same outlet. One is a sector specialist, the other a deep tech generalist, and both now back a company whose named customers run from AstraZeneca and Sanofi to BASF.
Both partners framed the bet in their own words. “AI is moving out of software and into the physical world, and biology is where that shift is accelerating,” said Oliver Schoppe, Partner at UVC Partners. Harry Briggs, Partner at Astanor, pointed at the bottleneck: “The constraint has been data. Until now, the field has been limited to training on what exists in nature.”
That second quote explains the shape of the use of funds. A model trained only on natural enzymes is limited by what evolution produced. If the Vilnius lab runs design cycles in days, it can also generate the kind of data Briggs describes, and the dataset is one of the three budget lines Biomatter names. The science, the bench and the dataset stay in Vilnius while about half the customers sit across the Atlantic.
Vilnius gets its enzyme lab in 2027
The milestones to watch are public and dated. The Vilnius facility is due to open in 2027. The stated target is design-to-lab cycles measured in days.
Lithuania is about to show what a model and a bench under one roof look like at 2,000 square meters. Let’s build more of them!
