$10.5m · Seed · Healthtech · Barcelona, Spain
ALLOX has closed a $10.5m Seed round led by Asabys through its Sabadell Asabys II fund, with participation from CDTI through SICC Innvierte and the Institut Català de Finances. The Barcelona biotech will use the capital to expand its high-throughput biophysics and AI platform, strengthen its internal drug-discovery team and move several small-molecule programmes towards a focused proprietary pipeline.
Finding druggable sites through function
Most small-molecule drugs are designed around a protein's active site. ALLOX is looking for other control points: allosteric and regulatory sites that change how a protein folds, interacts or functions. The company says its platform measures the effects of thousands of mutations in parallel, creating experimental maps of functional hotspots that can reveal new binding pockets in difficult targets such as intracellular protein-protein interactions and transcription factors.
The approach grew out of research in Ben Lehner's laboratory at Barcelona's Centre for Genomic Regulation. CRG says the founding team developed methods that could test up to one million variants of a protein in one experiment, then combined those measurements with computation to learn the biophysical rules governing protein behaviour. That experimental layer matters commercially because the AI models are trained on data ALLOX generates around functional changes, rather than relying only on structural databases or predictions of whether a molecule binds.
The financing therefore supports both sides of the platform: scaling the experiments that produce proprietary datasets and building models that predict where therapeutically useful hotspots may be found. If the system can turn those predictions into selective molecules, ALLOX could reduce the early search space for targets that conventional screening has struggled to address. The harder proof will be prospective: showing that candidates discovered through its maps retain the intended biological effect and can progress through the usual preclinical filters.
ALLOX is pursuing a dual model. It plans to advance its own small-molecule assets while enabling research collaborations with pharmaceutical and biotechnology partners. That creates two possible routes to validation: internal programmes can build asset value, while partner work can test whether the platform transfers across targets and disease areas. The round also adds Morten Graugaard as independent chair; ALLOX cites his experience across biotech investing, R&D and business development as it moves from platform formation towards pipeline execution.
Sources checked:
ALLOX company announcement · Centre for Genomic Regulation · Tech.eu Funding Explorer
