Biomatter raises seed round for AI enzyme design

Biomatter has raised about $7 million in a seed funding round led by Inventure and UVC Partners. Scientists from the Lithuanian firm published a paper in Nature Machine Intelligence in 2019 detailing functional enzymes created with generative artificial intelligence, which the company claims were the first of their kind (DOI: 10.1038/s42256-021-00310-5). Biomatter says it will put the funding toward further development of its method of creating de novo enzymes. While other AI-based protein design methods rely on making changes to existing proteins, the company says it has a “bottom-up” approach.