$40m · Series A · Healthtech · Lausanne, Switzerland
Lausanne-based Adaptyv, which operates an automated wet lab for testing newly designed proteins, has raised $40m in a Series A led by Highland Europe. Existing investors ACE Ventures, byFounders and Y Combinator also participated. The company said the capital will expand its Lausanne team and support a new London office and laboratory planned for the fourth quarter of 2026.
Wet-lab throughput becomes the bottleneck
Protein-design models can generate large numbers of candidate sequences, but those designs still need physical experiments to establish whether they express, bind and remain stable. Adaptyv packages that experimental work as infrastructure: through its public API, customers can submit sequences, obtain cost estimates, track gene synthesis, expression, purification and characterisation, and retrieve structured results such as binding classifications and melting temperatures.
That interface matters commercially because it shortens the hand-off between computational design and laboratory validation. Adaptyv says teams can feed results directly into the next design cycle, while integrations such as its early-access connection with Benchling let researchers order experiments without exporting files and rebuilding context across separate systems. The company is therefore selling more than assay capacity: it is trying to become the experimental layer inside customers' existing R&D workflows.
The company reported that laboratory throughput grew more than fivefold over the previous year and that it onboarded more than 100 customers, including Chai Discovery, Boltz, Roche and Novo Nordisk. Those are company-reported figures, but they point to demand from both AI-native biology teams and established pharmaceutical groups. The Series A will test whether Adaptyv can preserve turnaround times and reproducibility as volumes rise across two sites.
Capital goes into repeatable lab capacity
Adaptyv describes the lab as a set of automated workcells governed by common software and protocols. Regional development agency GGBa reported that the company plans to roughly triple capacity by the end of 2026, while expanding its team from 25 to around 60 people across production, automation and software. Replicating a workcell is potentially faster than rebuilding a bespoke laboratory workflow for every customer, but the model depends on consistent assay quality across instruments, teams and locations.
That execution detail is central to the investment case. Faster design software has limited value if experimental feedback remains scarce or slow. If Adaptyv can make wet-lab validation programmable and predictable, customers can run more design-build-test cycles without building equivalent infrastructure themselves. The new funding is therefore financing both physical capacity and the operational discipline required to make that capacity behave like a dependable software-connected service.
