Manifold Bio, a Boston, MA-based protein therapeutics company, raised $40M in Series A funding. The round was led by Triatomic Capital with participation from Section 32, FPV Ventures, Horizons Ventures, Tencent, Playground Global, Fifty Years, and FAST. With this funding, Triatomic Capital founding partner Jeff Huber will join Manifold Bio’s board of directors. Huber was previously founder and CEO of Grail and co-founder of Google’s life sciences efforts

Manifold Bio, a next-generation protein therapeutics company pioneering an in vivo biologics design platform, today announced the close of a $40 million Series A financing round led by Triatomic Capital and joined by new investors Section 32, FPV Ventures, Horizons Ventures, and Tencent.

In the creation of a new drug, there comes a point where you have to finally put the molecule in a real creature — one at a time — and see if it actually does what you think it does. Manifold Bio’s molecular machinery could let a hundred molecules be tested simultaneously in a single living system, potentially upending the whole process. The drug discovery space has advanced a lot in the last few years, first with fast and cheap gene transcription, then with CRISPR, then with AI-powered proteomics. You don’t have to know what all of those do, however, to understand that in the end, no matter how much they accelerate fundamental research, in vivo testing remains a major bottleneck