Insider Brief
- Multiply Labs raised $75 million in Series B funding to expand robotic systems that automate manual steps in biologics manufacturing, bringing its total funding to more than $100 million.
- Dr. Patrick Soon-Shiong and NantWorks led the round, with new investors including AstraZeneca, Lingotto, Teradyne and Strange Ventures, and the company plans to use the capital to expand manufacturing capacity, product development and its engineering, regulatory and commercial teams.
- Multiply Labs said its autonomous robotic clusters work with existing pharmaceutical equipment and can reduce cost per dose by 74% and deliver up to 100 times the throughput of manual manufacturing across cell and gene therapies, antibodies, viral vectors and mRNA therapies.
Multiply Labs raised $75 million in Series B funding to expand its robotic systems for automating manual steps in biologics manufacturing.
According to the San Francisco-based startup, Dr. Patrick Soon-Shiong and NantWorks led the round, with new investors AstraZeneca, Lingotto, Teradyne and Strange Ventures. Returning investors included Casdin Capital, Lux Capital, Fifty Years, Ora Global and Founders Fund. The financing brings the San Francisco company’s total funding to more than $100 million since its founding in 2016.
The company indicated it plans to use the new funding to expand manufacturing capacity, speed up product development and grow its engineering, regulatory and commercial teams as it goes from clinical-stage deployments toward commercial production.
What Multiply Labs is Doing
Multiply Labs is focused on developing autonomous systems to automate manufacturing steps that are difficult to scale with manual labor. The company pointed out that while AI speeds up drug discovery, manufacturing has not advanced at the same pace. The company said many biomanufacturing processes remain manual, which can slow how quickly new therapies are produced and increase the risk of contamination. Contamination is a particular concern in advanced biomanufacturing, the company said, because a single event can cause significant costs and production delays.
The company initially focused on cell and gene therapies and is now expanding into other advanced biologics, including antibodies, viral vectors and mRNA therapies.
“Robotics is the only way to deliver these therapies to patients at scale,” co-founder and CEO Fred Parietti said in the announcement. “AI is designing more therapies than the industry will ever be able to manufacture. This funding lets us build the capacity to close that gap, so more of the patients who need these treatments can actually get them.”
Its robotic clusters are designed to work with existing pharmaceutical equipment and manufacturing processes without requiring a new facility or changes to already validated procedures, according to Multiply Labs. The systems automate timed, repetitive production steps inside an enclosed, GMP-compliant environment.
Multiply Labs, which was founded in 2016 as a Y Combinator startup, claims its systems can reduce cost per dose by 74% and deliver as much as 100 times the throughput of manual manufacturing. The company stressed it isn’t just lab automation, as the robots can learn, adapt and operate continuously, reducing the manual handoffs between production steps where contamination can occur.
The robotic systems are owned and operated directly by pharmaceutical and biologics companies rather than provided as an outsourced manufacturing service. Multiply Labs said that approach allows manufacturers to keep production capacity under their own control.
“The world of physical AI biological manufacturing has arrived,” added Soon-Shiong, founder of NantWorks. “Manufacturing cell therapies is extraordinarily complex — every step must meet GMP standards when executing the intricate processes of cell manufacturing. Multiply Labs is building robots with the potential to change the speed and scale of these therapies for patients worldwide.”
