Biomatter raises $18M Series A to design industrial enzymes that don't exist in nature

Biomatter (Vilnius, Lithuania) has raised $18 million (approximately €16.2 million) in a Series A led by Astanor, with UVC Partners, Inventure, and Metaplanet participating. Founded in 2018 by Laurynas Karpus, Vykintas Jauniškis, and Irmantas Rokaitis — all of whom met at Vilnius University's Institute of Biotechnology — the company designs industrial enzymes from scratch using generative AI, targeting the chemical and pharmaceutical industries. The round funds a 2,000 m² lab in Vilnius (opening 2027) and a larger US commercial team.

The enzyme discovery problem

Industrial enzymes are the workhorses of modern manufacturing. They accelerate chemical reactions, replace harsh synthetic catalysts, and enable the production of pharmaceuticals, food ingredients, biofuels, and specialty chemicals at commercial scale. The global market exceeds $7 billion annually and is growing as industries substitute biological processes for petrochemical ones.

The traditional approach to enzyme discovery — screening existing organisms and iteratively modifying natural enzymes — is slow, expensive, and constrained by the limits of what evolution has already produced. The vast space of possible protein sequences that have never appeared in nature but could perform useful chemistry remains inaccessible to conventional methods.

Biomatter designs its enzymes computationally from the beginning: its AI platform generates candidate protein sequences for a desired chemical transformation, predicts which candidates are likely to fold correctly and function as intended, and ranks them before any lab work takes place. The approach is described as de novo — not adapting a natural enzyme but designing one that has no natural equivalent. The company is named in sources alongside EPO Young Inventors Prize recognition for the founding team's protein design methodology.

Enterprise customers as early validation

What sets Biomatter's Series A apart from the standard synthetic-biology funding round is the customer list at this stage. Sources name AstraZeneca, BASF, Sanofi, Tereos, and Thermo Fisher Scientific as existing enterprise customers — a list that spans pharmaceuticals, agrochemicals, food processing, and life-science tools. That range matters: it suggests the platform is not tied to one application domain, and that it has cleared the internal qualification processes of some of the most demanding procurement environments in the world.

Approximately half of Biomatter's current 25+ enterprise customers are US-based, which explains the emphasis on building a larger American commercial team as part of this financing.

Astanor and the Vilnius lab

Astanor Ventures, which led the round, invests at the intersection of food, agriculture, and sustainability — a mandate that fits Biomatter's industrial enzyme applications in food ingredients and agricultural chemistry. UVC Partners (Munich) and Inventure (Helsinki) add European industrial and technology networks; Metaplanet brings a Baltic-region anchor.

The 2,000 m² Vilnius design-and-testing lab, planned to open in 2027, is the round's central enabling investment. Biomatter's business model depends on a tight loop between computational design and physical testing — generating, synthesising, and characterising candidate enzymes fast enough that customers receive actionable results on commercially relevant timelines. At 25 people, that loop requires the lab. The question is whether the new facility, once running, compresses the cycle time enough to make AI-driven enzyme design the default over conventional discovery for the categories Biomatter is targeting.