WhiteLab Genomics raises $26M Series B for AI genomic medicines
Paris TechBio WhiteLab Genomics lands a $26M Series B led by AVP to validate AI-designed gene therapy vectors in living systems and push its Boston hub into North American partnerships.
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Founded 2019 · Paris, France
WhiteLab Genomics, the Paris-based company whose ALFRED platform uses AI to design gene and cell therapy delivery systems, has raised a $26M Series B led by AVP, with Yaday Health, Blast Club, Omnes Capital and Debiopharm Innovation Fund alongside.
The round was announced on 6 October 2026. AVP led; Yaday Health and Blast Club join as new investors, while Omnes Capital and Debiopharm Innovation Fund, both already on the cap table, re-upped. AVP managing partner François Robinet and Yaday Health managing partner Dr Daniel Teper take board seats.
The money goes where the company says its proof lives. In its own words, the financing will accelerate in vivo validation programmes across viral and non-viral delivery technologies and programmable payloads, strengthen the Boston hub for North American partnerships, and explore opportunities in Japan and South Korea – all in service of building a portfolio of experimentally validated bio-assets.
It is the company’s third disclosed raise: Y Combinator backed it early, and Omnes Capital led a $10M round in 2022 (Jones Day deal announcement, July 2022). The Series B takes disclosed funding to $36M. WhiteLab is also part of the French Tech 2030 programme.
ALFRED designs the vehicle, not the drug
Founded in 2019 by David Del Bourgo, Lucia Cinque and Julien Cottineau, WhiteLab Genomics employs around 54 people across Paris, Boston and Montréal (RocketReach, October 2026). Its platform, ALFRED, focuses on the part of genomic medicine that keeps tripping the field up: not the therapeutic idea, but the machinery that delivers it. The system designs and optimises adeno-associated viruses (AAVs), lipid nanoparticles and the programmable genetic payloads they carry, then validates the designs experimentally and in vivo.
The headline result so far came with the Paris Brain Institute: per the company’s announcement, novel AAVs that crossed the blood-brain barrier with a strong brain-to-liver targeting ratio and no detectable liver signal. Off-target liver accumulation is one of gene therapy’s recurring safety headaches, which is why that sentence matters more than any model benchmark. WhiteLab also works with Sanofi, Cytiva (Danaher), the University of Massachusetts, the Vision Institute and Institut Imagine.
“AI can help us design better genomic medicines, but what ultimately matters is whether those designs work in living systems,” said CEO David Del Bourgo in the announcement.
Gene therapy’s $6.6bn market still trips on delivery
The global gene therapy market was worth $6.6bn in 2025 and is forecast to reach $19.3bn by 2034, a 12.27% CAGR from 2026 (IMARC Group, August 2026). Growth at that rate is comfortable rather than explosive, and it is gated by exactly the problems WhiteLab sells against: delivery vehicles that miss their target tissue, payloads that are expensive to engineer, and safety signals that kill programmes late.
For scale against our own records: Sensible Biotechnologies closed a $47M Series A the same day for cell-made mRNA manufacturing, and Edonia, another French biotech, raised a €15M Series B the same week. A $26M Series B sits squarely in the band European platform biotechs are raising right now – enough to run in vivo programmes, not enough to drift.
What a Paris TechBio Series B signals
So what does this round tell us, in a week when European biotech announcements keep stacking up? First, that AI-for-biology funding has moved past model benchmarks. “WhiteLab is building AI that designs genomic medicines that actually work in vivo, not just on paper,” is how AVP’s Robinet put it – and the phrasing is the point. Two years ago a TechBio deck led with architecture diagrams; in 2026 the term sheet follows the animal data.
Second, the capital mix. The reflex reading says a US lead would have been the ambition signal. The fact is the ambition sits in the plan – Boston first, then Japan and South Korea – while the syndicate stays European: a French lead, a French mid-cap stalwart in Omnes, Swiss pharma money through Debiopharm. The good news is that European health capital is now deep enough to carry its own platform companies to the proof stage without waiting for San Francisco.
What we are watching: the additional data WhiteLab says it will present at the ESGCT Annual Congress, and whether the bio-asset portfolio model – platform partnerships plus owned, pre-validated assets – becomes the default shape of European TechBio. Every round in this space lands in our fundraising data as it happens.
Europe keeps asking when its AI champions will show up. Some of them are already here, designing viruses that know their way to the brain. Keep the proof bar exactly where this round just set it.
