BOSTON– Alloy Therapeutics, a biotechnology ecosystem company, has closed $42 million in Series D financing led by its existing investors 8VC and Mubadala Capital and joined by return investors Thiel Capital, Presight Capital, Founders Fund, and other unnamed family offices and sovereign wealth funds. Alloy will use proceeds from the Series D financing to further support the drug discovery community with new pre-competitive drug discovery technologies in new biologic modalities and new partnership models designed to fuel innovation.
Since Alloy’s Series C fundraise in March 2021, Alloy has expanded from its foundational antibody discovery technologies and discovery services into T-cell receptors (TCRs), with the launch of its Keyway TCR Discovery division, and genetic medicines through its collaboration with Dr. Sudhir Agrawal, the inventor of gapmer technology. Alloy has further expanded with three new research sites, in Basel, CH; Athens, GA; and San Francisco, CA.
“After three years of hard work and planning, we were proud to formally launch Keyway TCR Discovery in January 2022,” said Dongxing Zha, CEO of Keyway and Alloy’s CTO for TCR Modalities. “We envision a future in 20 years where engineered TCRs and TCR mimics are as successful a modality as monoclonal antibodies are today. Keyway believes this is possible by providing unrestricted access to enabling technologies and discovery services without pharma having to spend billions of dollars to acquire companies for proprietary technologies and people.”
In response to growing engagement from partners, Alloy will further leverage its Series D funds to continue to invest in expanded offerings across all six of its modalities. These will support the drug discovery community in the pursuit of multi-modal therapeutics while reducing or eliminating stacked downstream payments.
Through its affiliated venture studio, 82VS, Alloy supports scientist-entrepreneurs with seamless access to its cutting-edge technologies and discovery services. 82VS companies are often the first customers of Alloy’s innovations, having full access to the Alloy suite of technologies and discovery services to advance the best drug candidates and invent new applications that can benefit the broader Alloy ecosystem and, ultimately, patients and their caregivers.
To best serve the vast discovery needs of pharmaceutical companies, Alloy is pioneering an Innovation Subscription offering that gives its collaborators access to all current and future Alloy technology platforms for one flat, annual fee with no milestones or royalties. Partners benefit from Alloy as an ever-growing source of pre-competitive, foundational discovery technology. Alloy also supports complementary CROs, CDMOs and other discovery and development service providers as a critical part of the collaborative ecosystem to empower pharma in its mission to cure disease. In this subscription model, Alloy provides a new home for promising pre-competitive technologies and academic breakthroughs that have traditionally been underfunded or unavailable to all.
“Our Innovation Subscription model is available now as an exciting next step in furthering our collaborative mission and unlocking the potential for sharing foundational, pre-competitive drug discovery technologies with the global drug discovery community,” said Alloy Therapeutics Chief Executive Officer and Founder Errik Anderson. “Including this financing, Alloy will have invested hundreds of millions of dollars in innovation that the largest pharma companies can access through a flat, annual subscription with no additional milestones or royalties. Emerging biotech and academics can access our tech through collaboration and more traditional and creative structures. Combined with the reinvestment of 100% of our revenue, including our subscription revenue, back into innovation and access to innovation, Alloy is a new for-profit business model that plays for the collective long game in a non-zero-sum way. The value of a subscription goes up every year, while the fees stay flat or even will decrease with scale. We price this so a single avoided royalty will pay for the entire platform access over a 20-plus-year period. We are grateful for our longstanding investors for supporting this vision of arming the drug discovery industry with the tools they need to discover and develop the best medicines for patients more quickly.”
Alloy launched in 2017 to democratize foundational, pre-competitive technologies and capabilities for the discovery of therapeutic biologics and has since grown with over 130 partners across academia, biotech, and large biopharma. Its first platform was the ATX-Gx™, a suite of transgenic mouse strains for human antibody discovery that was originally in-licensed from a major pharma company and made broadly available to the drug discovery ecosystem by Alloy, with open access to newly introduced strains. Through its DeepImmune™ Antibody Discovery services, Alloy helps partners find the best therapeutic antibody candidates against targets of interest, by deploying a bespoke blend of its proprietary in vivo, in vitro, and in silico technologies and workflows. In 2022, Alloy launched Keyway™ TCR Discovery as its second fully integrated technology and services offering for the discovery of therapeutic engineered TCRs and TCR mimics.
“Alloy has successfully expanded its flagship discovery offering in antibodies to multiple promising modalities to better serve the global drug discovery community,” said Alaa Halawa, Head of Mubadala Capital’s US Ventures business, which first backed Alloy as an investor in its Series C financing. “We are proud to partner with the company as it executes on its promise of enabling scientists through the development of transformative drug discovery technologies. We look forward to seeing how the partnership with large pharma partners and other venture firms will leverage Alloy’s platform to enable their therapeutic discovery teams and emerging startups to advance the best medicines.”
