Adaptyv Bio raises $40M Series A to solve AI protein design's wet-lab bottleneck

Adaptyv Bio (Lausanne) has raised $40 million (approximately €34.35 million) in a Series A led by Highland Europe, with participation from existing investors ACE Ventures, ByFounders, and Y Combinator. The round brings total disclosed funding to approximately $48 million since the company's $8 million seed in November 2024, led by ACE Ventures. Adaptyv was founded in 2024 by Julian Englert and Daniel Nakhaee-Zadeh Gutierrez and operates automated wet labs that physically test the protein candidates AI biology tools generate — candidates that most organisations lack the throughput infrastructure to validate at scale.

The premise rests on a gap that has opened as computational protein design has accelerated. AI tools — including those from Chai Discovery and Boltz, both Adaptyv customers — can now produce thousands of candidate molecules for a therapeutic target in an afternoon. Confirming that those candidates actually bind, fold, and function in a biological environment still requires physical laboratory work. Most existing wet labs were built when a scientist might test a few dozen candidates per project. Adaptyv's automated infrastructure is designed for the AI era's actual output volumes: 100-plus customers, including Roche and Novo Nordisk, already use the service.

What the $40M funds

Three expansions run in parallel. Lab capacity triples by end of 2026, absorbing the demand backlog from a customer base that spans large pharmaceutical companies and AI biology startups. A new lab and office opens in London in Q4 2026 — Adaptyv's first non-Swiss location — extending the infrastructure to the UK market without relocating the Lausanne operation. The team grows from 25 to approximately 60 people, with the hires concentrated in experimental science and automation engineering rather than commercial functions.

The vertical expansion is the more consequential bet: the Series A also funds work on harder biology modalities, including antibody-drug conjugates, peptides, and protein degraders, where the validation problem is more complex and the AI-to-wet-lab throughput gap wider.

In October 2025, Adaptyv published a benchmark in partnership with Anthropic evaluating Claude's protein design performance; the benchmark reported a 26.8% average hit rate on protein design tasks. The collaboration does not involve a disclosed investment but names Adaptyv as part of the emerging experimental layer connecting AI labs to biology.

The investor read

Highland Europe is a growth-stage generalist fund that typically leads at Series B and later. Leading Adaptyv's Series A — without having participated in the seed — is an earlier entry than its pattern and an implicit read that the company's existing customer base constitutes a growth-stage business rather than early traction. ACE Ventures returning from the seed alongside ByFounders and Y Combinator completes a syndicate weighted toward European growth capital and the broader AI ecosystem, which also supplies Adaptyv's customers.

The 18-month test is a second-site one. Lausanne has established throughput. London will determine whether Adaptyv's automation infrastructure is genuinely portable across geographies and operating contexts — and whether a team of 60, spread across two cities, retains the execution pace of one at 25.