Prolific Machines announces $50M Series B2 initial close. Patrick Soon-Shiong's involvement with Prolific Machines now reaches from the boardroom into a portfolio of potential manufacturing applications. As Nant Capital co-leads the biotechnology company's new financing, NantWorks has agreed to collaborate on biologic programs across its health and life sciences companies. That pairing gives the Emeryville, California business a particularly useful relationship: financial backing alongside a route toward applying its technology. Prolific announced the initial closing of its $50M Series B2 on October 14, 2026, led by Atoms & Bits and Nant Capital. The company says its cumulative funding now exceeds $100M; it has not separately disclosed the proceeds of this initial closing. The capital supports a broader rollout of technology that uses light to regulate protein production inside living cells, with implications for the way pharmaceutical manufacturers develop and run their processes. What the Series B2 brings into the business. The financing comes with two board appointments: Soon-Shiong, the founder of NantWorks, and James Stewart, founder of Level One Fund and Atoms & Bits. Breakthrough Energy Ventures, Mayfield, SOSV and Fonterra's venture arm also participated. Wilson Sonsini, which advised Prolific on patent and trademark matters related to the transaction, confirms the initial-close announcement and the two lead investors. The closing language deserves to travel with the headline. Prolific has announced an initial closing within a $50M Series B2 financing, while leaving the first tranche's proceeds unspecified. Its reported lifetime funding figure is a company disclosure, rather than a total readers should rebuild by adding every historical headline. Earlier announcements include financing instruments and differently described round stages, making that shortcut unreliable. The use of proceeds has a fairly practical center. Prolific plans to expand its team, develop its technology and scale programs across novel biologics, biosimilars and viral vectors. It also identifies early work toward tissue and organ fabrication. For a prospective pharmaceutical partner, the immediately relevant part is the ability to support more programs through Prolific's Bay Area campus and its contract development and manufacturing organization network. The investment pays for capacity to deliver a system that has to work within someone else's manufacturing requirements. Giving a production team another control. Optogenetics uses proteins that respond to light to influence cellular behavior. Prolific combines engineered cell lines with illumination hardware and process optimization so that gene expression can be adjusted during production. In plain terms, the manufacturer gets another way to influence when a cell makes a protein and how strongly it does so. The light supplies an instruction; it is not feeding the cells through photosynthesis. That distinction connects the technology to a familiar process-design problem. A cell's growth and its output of a desired protein place different demands on the production system. The ability to adjust expression timing lets a development team consider growth and production separately, then tune the process around the molecule it wants. Prolific describes its illumination systems as compatible with existing bioreactors, keeping installed equipment inside the customer's purchasing decision. Compatibility still leaves meaningful engineering work. In its technical explanation, the company describes modeling and small-scale experiments to fit illumination to a partner's reactor and process. Cell density, media and wavelength affect how light reaches the culture. That work makes the commercial offering more substantial than a lighting accessory: the engineered cell, the signal and the process have to function together. A manufacturing team would evaluate the resulting productivity and quality within its own application, where an attractive platform claim becomes a specific production decision. From cultivated meat to pharmaceutical infrastructure. Deniz Kent, CEO, and Max Huisman, CTO, founded Prolific with Declan Jones in 2020. The company's account of its origins begins with cultivated meat and follows the team into a wider set of biological products. That history matters because the commercial direction has become more focused even as the underlying control technology retains broader possible uses. Today's business is asking pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies to reconsider how they manufacture proteins. The current leadership page places Kent and Huisman alongside scientific, operating and commercial executives. Building a product for this market requires those disciplines to meet inside the customer's development process. The hardware must fit the facility, the biological system must express the intended molecule, and the service relationship must help a partner move the work forward. The new board members enter a business where product performance and delivery capacity remain closely connected. Prolific says the funding will expand programs with several top-20 pharmaceutical companies and multiple biotechs. Those statements establish the company's account of demand without supplying named customer economics or a revenue figure. Its commercial model includes services and licensing, giving partners different ways to engage as their programs develop. The opportunity is to make the same control approach useful across distinct manufacturing settings, while doing the application-specific work each setting requires. How the NantWorks collaboration changes the conversation. NantWorks gives the financing a relationship with a defined industrial destination. The two companies intend to apply Prolific's platform across biologic programs within the NantWorks health and life sciences portfolio. For Prolific, that can put its cell-control technology into conversations about particular programs and manufacturing needs. For the portfolio companies, it creates a channel for evaluating a different production approach through an agreed collaboration. The announced relationship does not disclose purchase commitments, license payments or guaranteed production volumes. Its strategic value is the connection between technology development and potential use across a portfolio. That is a useful way to read this round: an investor and its associated operating ecosystem can bring knowledge of the work that follows financing, alongside the capital needed to support it. The eventual economics will emerge from the programs and agreements themselves. The same interest in improving pharmaceutical production also runs through DevCuration's coverage of Multiply Labs' robotic biomanufacturing systems, which approach factory operations through automation. Prolific's hiring page currently includes analytical, hardware, optical, software and project-management roles. Those openings make the expansion plan tangible without revealing a promised headcount. As the company adds capacity, the NantWorks collaboration provides a set of biological applications around which scientists, engineers and manufacturing teams can organize the next phase of work. The relationship will develop through the individual processes they choose to build together. DevCuration Data Biotech funding, last 30 days. DevCuration's funding database tracked 6 Biotech rounds totaling $3B in disclosed capital over the past 30 days. Recent deals DevCuration covered:

LABJ insider: Soon-Shiong grows investment pool. October 19, 2026 One of our wealthiest Angelenos, Patrick Soon-Shiong, has been wielding that influence throughout the rest of California this month. The biomedical magnate, who made much of his fortune through cancer drug development, last week was part of a $50 million investment round into Prolific Machines, a biotech firm in Emeryville. Soon-Shiong's Nant Capital - part of his wider business umbrella, NantWorks - co-led the round alongside growth-stage fund Atoms & Bits Capital based in Miami. Prolific Machines works primarily in optogenetics - the combination of genetic engineering and how light interacts with cells - to develop its novel biologics, biosimilars and viral vector platforms. According to the funding announcement, some of this funding will also advance the firm's work toward organ and tissue fabrication. Soon-Shiong's investment landed him a seat on Prolific Machines' board, growing his influence in California's biotech environment. "Prolific Machines is the most exciting advancement I have seen in biopharma manufacturing in decades," Soon-Shiong said in a statement, adding that Prolific Machines' team has "built the control system that has long been missing from making medicines in living cells. I look forward to NantWorks, its affiliate companies and Prolific working together on multiple fronts." This investment follows a $75 million round for San Francisco-based Multiply Labs earlier this month, which NantWorks itself led. That company uses physical artificial intelligence to automate medicinal manufacturing processes. "The world of physical AI biological manufacturing has arrived," Soon-Shiong said of that investment. "Manufacturing cell therapies is extraordinarily complex - every step must meet (Good Manufacturing Practice) standards when executing the intricate processes of cell manufacturing. Multiply Labs is building robots with the potential to change the speed and scale of these therapies for patients worldwide." Capping off a good month, the Food and Drug Administration granted another expanded use authorization for Anktiva, the bladder cancer therapy developed by Soon-Shiong's ImmunityBio in Culver City.

Prolific Machines announces new investment led by Nant Capital and Atoms & Bits as well as a strategic NantWorks collaboration, and Board appointments. Science · OCT 14, 2026 PR Newswire Prolific Machines announced a new investment led by Atoms & Bits and Nant Capital to scale its optogenetics-enabled biomanufacturing platform. The company... * Prolific Machines announced a new investment led by Atoms & Bits and Nant Capital to scale its optogenetics-enabled biomanufacturing platform. * The company also entered a strategic collaboration with NantWorks to apply its platform across biologics programs within NantWorks' health and life sciences portfolio. * Patrick Soon-Shiong, M.D. and James Stewart have joined Prolific Machines' Board of Directors. EMERYVILLE, Calif, Oct. 14, 2026 /PRNewswire/ - Prolific Machines, the biotechnology company advancing biologics development and manufacturing through integrated optogenetics-enabled solutions delivering breakthrough yields, superior on-target quality, and precise process control, today announced the initial closing of its $50M Series B2 financing led by Atoms & Bits, a growth-stage fund, and Nant Capital, the investment organization which is part of a portfolio of private and public companies in health and life sciences founded by Patrick Soon-Shiong, M.D. This brings the company's total funding to over $100 million. Prolific Machines will use the new capital to scale its optogenetics platform for biomanufacturing, expanding programs with several top-20 pharma companies and multiple biotechs at its San Francisco Bay Area campus and across its CDMO network. The funding will support team growth, further technology development and scale-up across novel biologics, biosimilars and viral vector programs. It will also fund early work toward tissue and organ fabrication. Prolific Machines and NantWorks also announced a strategic collaboration to apply Prolific's platform across biologic programs within NantWorks' portfolio of health and life sciences companies. "For the last seven years the Prolific Machines team has been creating the field of Optogenetic Biomanufacturing, allowing any process inside of any cell to be controlled with light. Our goal is to provide the lowest cost and highest precision infrastructure to control biology. We have demonstrated that it works, can be scaled, and that people want it. Our biggest issue now is having too much demand and this funding round changes that. We will be rapidly scaling the business over the next 12 months," said Deniz Kent, Ph.D., CEO and Co-Founder of Prolific Machines. As part of the financing, James Stewart, founder of Level One Fund and Atoms & Bits, and Patrick Soon-Shiong, M.D., founder of NantWorks, have joined Prolific Machines' Board of Directors. Existing investors, including Breakthrough Energy Ventures, Mayfield, SOSV, and Fonterra's venture arm, also participated in the round. "Prolific Machines is the most exciting advancement I have seen in biopharma manufacturing in decades. Deniz and his team have built the control system that has long been missing from making medicines in living cells. I look forward to NantWorks, its affiliate companies and Prolific working together on multiple fronts," said Patrick Soon-Shiong, M.D., founder of NantWorks. "Prolific's optogenetic platform brings precise, programmable control to cells, with major potential across biopharma and beyond. Its early traction already shows strong commercial promise," commented James Stewart, General Partner of Atoms & Bits. About Prolific Machines Prolific is a biotechnology-driven company advancing biologics development and manufacturing through integrated optogenetics-enabled solutions delivering breakthrough yields, superior on-target quality, and precise process control. Its next-generation integrated platform combines light-inducible cell lines, plug-and-play illumination systems, and AI-driven process optimization to enable dynamic control of protein expression in standard bioreactors. Prolific partners with biotech and pharmaceutical companies and CDMOs worldwide to advance programs from development toward scalable, cost-efficient manufacturing. To learn more, visit prolific-machines.com About Atoms & Bits Atoms & Bits is a growth-stage venture capital firm backing companies at the intersection of the digital and physical worlds. Founded by the teams behind Level One Fund and Primal Capital, the firm partners with founders leveraging advances in AI, software and computation to build transformative products and infrastructure in the physical world. Learn more at https://atomsandbits.xyz. About NantWorks NantWorks, LLC applies new innovative approaches and new technologies to solving global problems. NantWorks is focusing on three pillars: health & life sciences; energy & renewables; and connectivity & communications. Founded by Dr. Patrick Soon-Shiong, scientist and inventor of the first human nanoparticle chemotherapeutic agent Abraxane, the core mission for NantWorks is convergence: to develop and deliver a diverse range of technologies that accelerate innovation, broaden the scope of scientific discovery, enhance ground-breaking research, and improve healthcare treatment for those in need. 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