Biotech innovator Nuclera has secured an additional 12 million dollars in financing, expanding its Series C round to a total of 87 million dollars as it pushes forward with its mission to modernise protein and antibody discovery. The latest investment, led by Elevage Medical Technologies and Jonathan Milner with continued support from British Business Bank and GK Goh, strengthens the company’s position in the rapidly growing biologics research market.
A New Era in Protein Discovery
Nuclera develops tools that make complex protein workflows faster, more predictable and more accessible to researchers. At the centre of its work is eProtein Discovery, a benchtop system that streamlines protein expression and purification by combining cell free expression, digital microfluidics and high throughput screening.
Traditional protein production can take weeks and often introduces layers of uncertainty. By integrating expression, purification and analysis into a single automated process, Nuclera aims to shorten early discovery timelines, reduce costs and provide researchers with reliable access to protein and antibody candidates.
Bringing AI Into the Lab Bench
With the new financing, Nuclera is expanding deeper into AI enabled protein engineering, an area that requires large, high quality datasets to train advanced models. To support these efforts, the company plans to extend eProtein Discovery with antibody specific capabilities, enabling scientists to perform expression, purification and binding validation for full format antibodies within one integrated system.
This expansion will allow research teams to generate scalable datasets with consistent quality, addressing one of the biggest bottlenecks in biologics research. While AI models for protein design have advanced rapidly, their effectiveness depends heavily on the quantity and reliability of experimental data. Nuclera aims to become the primary laboratory engine that powers those datasets.
High Throughput Antibody Engineering on a Single Platform
The addition of antibody functionality to eProtein Discovery will give researchers a complete, end to end workflow for antibody discovery. They will be able to run multiplex protein screening, characterisation and expression within a single instrument, enabling faster exploration of candidates and improving the likelihood of identifying promising therapeutic leads early.
This marks a significant shift from traditional antibody engineering processes, which rely on multiple disconnected lab methods and often require specialised equipment and outsourcing. Nuclera’s integrated approach is designed to remove this fragmentation and give teams full control over discovery from the bench.
A Foundational Platform for Next Generation Biologics
According to Dr Michael Chen, CEO and co founder, the new investment reflects the company’s strong momentum and the market’s confidence in its strategy. He notes that biologics researchers increasingly rely on AI models but face the challenge of sourcing high quality experimental data to train them effectively.
Dr Chen emphasises that Nuclera is positioning eProtein Discovery to become a foundational platform for protein and antibody engineering. By tightly coupling lab automation with high fidelity dataset generation, the system aims to accelerate therapeutic discovery and improve the success rate of biologics programs.
Momentum Across the Biotech Landscape
Nuclera’s Series C extension comes at a time when demand for advanced protein engineering tools is growing rapidly. Pharmaceutical companies, contract research organisations and academic labs are seeking ways to push more candidates into development pipelines while reducing the uncertainty that has historically slowed drug discovery.
The company’s integrated workflow approach addresses this need by collapsing traditionally separate stages of discovery into a single process. This can help researchers identify promising molecules earlier and reduce the number of failed experiments that often derail therapeutic programs.
Fueling the Next Phase of Growth
The new funding will support Nuclera’s continued development of antibody expression and binding validation technology, strengthen the company’s engineering and research teams and accelerate commercial deployment of the upgraded eProtein Discovery platform.
With its expanded vision and strengthened capital position, Nuclera is poised to play a central role in the evolution of protein and antibody engineering, helping the biotech sector move toward a future where discovery is faster, more data driven and more predictable.
