Head of Lab Operations

Highland Europe leads EUR 40m Adaptyv Series A. #Adaptyv Bio #Highland Europe #Series A #AI biotech #Switzerland venture capital Deal at a glance. * Type - funding · Series A * Enterprise value - €40M * Original amount - EUR 40M * Target - Adaptyv Bio * Acquirer - - * Investor - Highland Europe, Ace Ventures, ByFounders, Y Combinator * Sector - Healthcare * Region - - * Announced - - Deal-ID: MMN-000915 Key facts. * Buyer - Highland Europe, Ace Ventures, ByFounders, Y Combinator * Target - Adaptyv Bio * Sector - Healthcare * Geography - - * Deal volume - €40M * Date - - Adaptyv Bio's EUR 40 million Series A is a bet on scaled, automation-heavy R&D infrastructure rather than point solutions. Highland Europe led the financing, with ACE Ventures, byFounders and Y Combinator participating, backing a Swiss company positioning itself as a full-stack platform for AI-enabled protein engineering. The round was recently announced. Terms beyond the headline amount were not disclosed. Why this deal, why now. European venture funding has tilted sharply toward AI-native businesses, and investors are increasingly concentrating capital into fewer, larger platform plays. Multiple 2026 European VC data points put AI at more than half of the region's venture capital deployment in H1 2026, with one report citing 55% of all VC capital and another pegging AI at 60.3% of deal value. Against that backdrop, Adaptyv's pitch fits the current underwriting: build automation and compute-enabled workflows that can compound over time, then sell outcomes or capacity into large end markets. Adaptyv is described as an automated lab focused on AI-driven protein design and validation, with the Series A earmarked to expand a full-stack platform for protein engineering and AI-enabled biology. Company and ecosystem context. Adaptyv is Switzerland-based, with reporting linking it to the Biopôle/Vaud cluster around Lausanne. Swiss biotech coverage in 2026 has highlighted continued momentum in national hubs such as Basel and Lausanne, and Adaptyv's ability to attract a globally recognised investor set reinforces that Switzerland remains on the map for AI-biotech formation. The investor mix matters. Highland Europe's lead, alongside ACE Ventures, byFounders and Y Combinator, signals international syndication around a Swiss deep-tech life-science asset. For founders, that typically translates into a higher bar for execution and a clear expectation of scaling beyond a local market. Strategic lens: platform build vs tool sprawl. Adaptyv's stated use of proceeds points to a classic platform build-out: integrating wet-lab automation with AI models and validation loops to shorten iteration cycles in protein engineering. In life sciences, where data quality and experimental throughput can be gating factors, the value proposition often hinges on owning the full feedback loop rather than operating as a software layer on top of third-party labs. That strategy is increasingly aligned with where venture dollars are flowing in Europe. Reports citing AI capturing EUR 26.5 billion in H1 2026, and mega-rounds in broader AI infrastructure, underscore a market preference for scaled infrastructure over fragmented tooling. For AI-enabled biology, "infrastructure" can mean lab automation, workflow orchestration, proprietary datasets, and model-training pipelines that are hard to replicate. Integration and execution questions. This is a funding round, not an acquisition, but execution risk still sits in integration across disciplines. Key questions investors will track include: * Systems integration: how tightly Adaptyv can link automation, data capture, model training and experimental validation without creating bottlenecks. * Leadership depth: whether the company has enough senior operators across biology, automation engineering and ML to scale the platform in parallel. * Go-to-market focus: whether the initial commercial motion targets services revenue, platform access, partnerships, or co-development, and how that choice affects margins and scalability. * Customer concentration and churn risk: if early revenues come from a small number of pharma or biotech partners, retention and repeatability will matter as much as topline growth. Repeat backing across seed and Series A, as reported in coverage, suggests continued investor conviction in the build plan, but it also raises the bar for demonstrating measurable throughput gains and differentiated outcomes. What to watch next. * Hiring pace in automation engineering, protein engineering and applied ML, and whether Adaptyv adds senior commercial leadership. * Evidence of platform repeatability: published throughput metrics, cycle-time reductions, or validated performance improvements in protein design. * The commercial model: services-heavy early revenue versus a more productised platform approach. * Partnerships with pharma, CDMOs, or research institutes that can scale data generation and validation. * Follow-on financing signals, including whether the next round tilts toward growth equity as European capital continues to concentrate into fewer AI winners. Companies & investors in this story. Sources.

Adaptyv raises $40 million to build the automated AI lab for agentic biology. 27 August 2026 Key Takeaways * Adaptyv raises $40M led by Highland Europe to scale an automated wet lab for AI-driven protein design. * The startup closes the bottleneck between AI-designed proteins and real lab testing with cell-free synthesis and robotics. * It will launch London lab in Q4 2026, doubling the Lausanne team, and powering agentic biology. AI can now design thousands of protein molecules in an afternoon. But it's yet to find a way to determine if they actually work. Most labs were built to test 20 designs, not thousands of them. For this reason, Adaptyv raises $40 million to build an automated lab that lets AI design, test, and learn from proteins at scale. AI is faster than the lab. AI has made protein design easy. Tools like AlphaFold, Boltz, and Chai can generate thousands of candidates for a drug target in hours. The problem is what comes next. In traditional drug discovery, you hand those designs to scientists who order DNA, grow cells, produce the protein, and run binding assays. That process takes weeks. It's also expensive and built for a world where you only needed to test a handful of molecules. Today's AI models can spit out two thousand designs for one target. Wet labs simply weren't designed for that volume. From digital sequence to lab data. Lausanne-based Adaptyv Bio announced a $40 million Series A. The round was led by Highland Europe, with existing investors Ace Ventures, ByFounders, and Y Combinator doubling down. Ace Ventures also led the $8M Seed in late 2024 and called Adaptyv the solution to the gap between AI design and wet lab validation. Adaptyv has built what it calls "an automated, AI-native lab." You start with a digital protein sequence and end with real experimental data, without a scientist touching a pipette. The core of it is cell-free protein production. Instead of engineering living cells to make proteins, Adaptyv uses just the biochemical machinery needed to turn DNA into protein. What makes it "agentic" is the API. Customers can submit designs through a web platform, but they can also connect directly through an API. That means AI agents can design a protein, send the order to Adaptyv's lab, get results back, and use that data to design the next round, all without human intervention. The API is already integrated with tools like Boltz, Chai, Cradle, Tamarind, Latent Labs and Benchling. Adaptyv is scaling to power agentic biology. The new $40M will fund three priorities. First, building out more automated lab infrastructure to handle higher throughput. Second, doubling the team in Lausanne to support more customers and faster turnaround. Third, opening a new office and lab in London in Q4 2026 to be closer to European pharma and AI customers. Adaptyv is also investing in community. It launched Proteinbase, a competition platform that attracted 680 participants and 10,000 protein designs in a single competition. The goal is to crowdsource hard protein problems and generate more public training data for the field. This funding is about closing the loop between AI prediction and experimental validation. AI systems can propose experiments, run them, learn from the results, and propose the next ones, all autonomously. Adaptyv is building the infrastructure layer to make that real. Switzerland is positioning itself at the center of this shift. The country now has over 55 VC-backed TechBio startups, with a concentration of AI-driven protein engineering companies around Lausanne and Zurich. With this Series A, Adaptyv is betting it can become the default lab backend for that ecosystem. I'm a crypto writer with 4+ years of experience passionate about turning big, technical ideas into content anyone can understand. From blockchain to stablecoins to everything in between, I enjoy helping readers stay informed in a space that never stops moving. Disclaimer VentureBurn is a media platform covering the latest in cryptocurrency, artificial intelligence, venture capital, and the startup ecosystem. Opinions expressed on VentureBurn are for informational purposes only and do not constitute investment advice. Before making any high-risk investments in digital assets or emerging technologies, readers should conduct their own due diligence. All transactions and financial decisions are made at your own risk, and any losses incurred are solely your responsibility. VentureBurn does not endorse or recommend the buying or selling of any digital assets and is not a licensed investment advisor. Please note that VentureBurn may participate in affiliate marketing programs.

Lausanne-based Adaptyv raises €34.35 million Series A to build the automated lab for agentic biology. August 27, 2026 Adaptyv Bio, the Lausanne-based BioTech startup building an automated wet lab for AI-driven protein design, has raised a €34.35 million ($40 million) Series A round. The round was led by Highland Europe, with existing investors Ace Ventures, ByFounders, and Y Combinator doubling down. Ace Ventures led the company's €6.8 million ($8 million) Seed round in late 2024. "AI has made it easy to design proteins. Many teams can now create thousands of candidate molecules for a target in an afternoon. Finding out whether those molecules actually work is still the hard part. That requires a wet lab. But most wet labs were built for a world where scientists tested twenty designs per target, not two thousand. Adaptyv closes this gap," ACE Ventures said. Founded by Julian Englert and Daniel Nakhaee-Zadeh Gutierrez, Adaptyv has built "an automated, AI-native lab" where the process starts with a digital protein sequence and ends with real experimental data. DNA is synthesised in-house, proteins are expressed cell-free, and binding is measured using SPR with built-in quality control. Customers can submit their designs through a web platform, or through an API, allowing AI agents to order their own experiments directly. When ACE led Adaptyv's Seed round in November 2024, the startup had only nine people and a lab that was beginning to see commercial demand. Fast forward to 2026: the team has tripled, revenue has grown roughly 10x, the company has brought DNA synthesis in-house, scaled lab automation, and even launched its Proteinbase competition platform, attracting "680 participants and 10,000 protein designs to one competition." Adaptyv has also shipped a public API now integrated with Boltz, Chai, Cradle, Tamarind, Latent Labs and Benchling. It now counts over 100 customers, including frontier AI labs, top 5 pharma companies and AI-native drug discovery startups. The company recently ran a benchmark with Anthropic, sending 16 targets from its public design competitions to Claude Science and testing the resulting sequences, anonymised. According to the company, 95% of the 1,320 designs were expressed. "Out of 1,320 designs, 354 bound their target, giving Claude an average hit rate of 26.8%. Only a single target yielded 0 binders. Compared to the results of our Protein Design Competitions, Claude's designs had noticeably higher success rates and would have won 5 out 6, yielding tighter binders," reported the company The test showcased how Adaptyv is "becoming the place frontier labs go when they need real-world proof". The company noted that Google DeepMind runs a similar validation loop, Chai Discovery used Adaptyv to validate its Chai-2 zero-shot antibody release, and Roche and Novo Nordisk run therapeutic design cycles roughly 4x faster than their internal pipelines. The new capital will fund two types of growth: horizontal expansion of lab capacity and vertical expansion into harder biology problems. On the horizontal side, the startup plans to roughly triple its lab capacity by the end of 2026 and keep growing through 2027. On the vertical side, it intends to move beyond binding measurements, which is a market estimated to be worth "a few hundred million dollars a year", into developability and full biophysical characterisation, next-generation modalities such as peptides, ADCs and degraders, and eventually cell-based function. For the horizontal expansion, Adaptyv Bio has announced a new lab and office will open in London in the fourth quarter of 2026, alongside an expansion in Lausanne. The company plans to grow its team from 25 to around 60, with a focus on production, automation and software. For its founders, the long-term goal is to build a biological gigafactory with enough automated experimental capacity for AI to learn from physical reality as quickly as it learns from text. Adaptyv's goal is for lab throughput to no longer be the constraint on how fast biology can progress.