Finnish protein engineering company Avenue Biosciences has secured $5.7 million in a seed extension funding round, marking a significant step forward for one of the most promising new players in biologics manufacturing. The round was co-led by Balnord and Tesi, with participation from returning investors Voima Ventures, Inventure, the University of Helsinki and Dimerent. With this new injection of capital, the company has now raised $8.7 million since 2024, strengthening its mission to modernise and accelerate the development of complex therapeutic proteins.
Avenue Biosciences, a transatlantic biotechnology company headquartered in Palo Alto with laboratory operations in Helsinki, focuses on enabling efficient development of protein biologics, therapeutic drugs produced in living cells that target intricate biological pathways. These biologics have revolutionised treatment for cancer, autoimmune disorders, and rare diseases, but their complexity also makes them difficult to manufacture at scale. Much of this challenge stems from the cellular secretory pathway, the machinery responsible for folding and exporting proteins, which often becomes a bottleneck for producing advanced therapies.
Breaking Through a Long-Standing Bottleneck in Biologics
For decades, scientists relied on a small set of well-characterised signal peptides, short amino acid sequences that direct new proteins through the secretory pathway. These peptides act as molecular “addresses” that determine whether a protein is successfully exported from the cell, a crucial step for large-scale therapeutic production. Despite their importance, traditional approaches required testing them one by one, a slow and inefficient process that has held the industry back.
Avenue Biosciences has developed the first platform capable of measuring and modulating the secretory pathway at scale, enabling the parallel screening of thousands of signal peptide variants in a single experiment. This dramatically speeds up the identification of optimal combinations for improving protein yield, stability, and manufacturability. As co-founder and COO Katja Rosti explains, the biology behind the system has existed for decades, but the tools to interrogate it systematically have only recently become possible.
Modern biologics, especially next-generation therapies such as multispecific antibodies and AI-designed proteins, are more targeted and effective than ever. However, their increasing complexity makes manufacturing even more challenging. Avenue’s platform addresses this issue by enabling superior protein secretion without altering the therapeutic target. This approach is equally valuable for biosimilars, where lower-cost versions of existing therapies rely heavily on efficient manufacturing.
High-Throughput Engineering, Powered by Machine Learning
Avenue’s platform uses a library of 5,000 to 6,000 signal peptides that can be paired with any customer-provided target sequence. By screening these variants in parallel, the company uncovers high-performing combinations in a fraction of the time required by traditional workflows. This not only accelerates discovery but also significantly reduces the risk of late-stage failures, which often occur when a promising therapeutic candidate cannot be produced at sufficient yield.
The data generated from these experiments feed into proprietary machine-learning models, creating a feedback loop between computation and wet-lab biology. This integration allows the company to refine prediction tools and guide the design of future experiments. As Rosti notes, “AI can propose protein designs, but biology decides whether they work. Our platform bridges that gap.”
Strong Commercial Traction and Investor Confidence
Avenue Biosciences initially validated its own technology by serving as its first customer during the research-to-business phase. After coming out of stealth in late 2024, the company rapidly gained traction and generated revenue within its first year. Today, its customers include established CDMOs and pharmaceutical companies that recognise the limitations of current secretion strategies and seek more scalable solutions.
Investors say the company is addressing one of the most critical and under-solved challenges in biologics manufacturing, combining deep scientific expertise with scalable engineering and data-driven tools. They believe Avenue’s platform has the potential to become a gold standard for therapeutic protein production.
Building for the Future
The newly raised capital will be used primarily to expand scientific capability, strengthen core platform development, and hire additional wet-lab scientists. While commercial expansion is on the horizon, Avenue emphasises that deep biological knowledge remains its foundation.
With its blend of cutting-edge biology, high-throughput screening, and machine learning, Avenue Biosciences is redefining how complex proteins are developed and produced a shift that could unlock new possibilities for next-generation therapies and make life-changing treatments more widely accessible.