Graph Therapeutics, a techbio startup developing an AI-powered platform for inflammation and immunology (I&I) drug discovery, has secured $3.1 million in pre-seed funding. The round was led by Squareone (which backed coboworx and atmio) and Merantix Capital (which backed Ovom Care and Briink), with participation from NAVEC Investment Management and strategic angel investors such as Mehdi Ghissassi via the Atomico Angel Program.
The company will use the investment to advance its platform development and expand its team of computational and biological scientists.
Plans to revolutionuise $257B market
The financing comes at a time when inflammation and immunology have emerged as a significant therapeutic area in biotech, with multiple new mechanisms being explored and considerable capital flowing into the space. While the company will initially focus on sterile inflammation, its goal is to develop more effective therapies against immune dysregulation from several related I&I diseases, representing combined market opportunities projected to exceed $257 billion by 2032.
Who is behind the company?
Graph Therapeutics was founded by Gregory Vladimer, Berend Snijder, and Robert Sehlke in 2024 in Vienna, Austria. Dr. Vladimer previously served as CSO and scientific co-founder of Allcyte, and following its acquisition by Exscientia in 2021, served as Vice President of Translational Research and later led the Multimodal Discovery Lab.
Graph’s CTO and co-founder, Robert Sehlke, PhD, spearheaded Allcyte’s computational platform development before leading Translational Bioinformatics at Exscientia. Several other members of the Graph team have worked together since the Allcyte and Exscientia days, all learning from shared experiences in building successful techbio through partnerships and innovation.
Next-gen AI drug discovery platform
It is developing a next-generation lab-in-the-loop AI platform to transform drug discovery in inflammation and immunology. Graph’s platform represents the culmination of a decade of innovation in combining complex primary patient disease models with AI to close the translational gap between pre-clinical models and patients in drug discovery.
Led by a team of techbio veterans, Graph combines ‘ex vivo’ perturbation modeling, multimodal datasets, and advanced machine learning to identify the most clinically impactful drug targets and develop effective therapies for inflammatory diseases.
“The complexity of inflammatory and immunological diseases demands a fundamentally different approach to drug discovery,” said Gregory Vladimer, PhD, CEO and co-founder of Graph. “Tackling immune-driven diseases and autoimmunity requires understanding and rebalancing intricate immune system networks. Our platform builds upon our team’s extensive experience in successfully applying AI approaches in precision oncology and immuno-oncology, and we have evolved our approach to meet the distinct challenges of immunologically driven diseases, to bring forward pre-clinical de-risking in the discovery timeline.”
The post Graph Therapeutics secures $3.1M to disrupt $257B AI-powered inflammation & immunology drug discovery market appeared first on Tech Funding News.