With demand for advanced manufacturing solutions mounting across the industry, the moment is ripe to capitalize on investor interest and build out toward a potential production paradigm shift.
Seizing that momentum these past two weeks were Prolific Machines—aiming optogenetics at current biomanufacturing shortfalls—and Multiply Labs, using robotics in a bid to keep pace with increasingly AI-suffused drug development.
Through a series of funding moves, the companies have separately topped off their coffers and, perhaps equally importantly, attracted the interest of deca-billionaire Patrick Soon-Shiong, M.D., and his biotech empire.
First up, Prolific Machines on Wednesday unveiled the initial close of a $50 million series B2 financing, led by Atoms & Bits and Soon-Shiong’s Nant Capital, bringing the optogenetics players’ total funding to more than $100 million to date.
The cash will fuel scale-up of Prolific Machines’ biomanufacturing optogenetics platform and help to expand programs with a number of unnamed major pharmas, Bay Area biotechs and additional partners across the company’s CDMO network.
The cash will also support workforce build-out, plus additional tech development and scale-up work on novel biologics, biosimilar and viral vector programs—plus early work toward tissue and organ fabrication.
Prolific Machines’ approach relies on a bespoke photomolecular platform that uses light and optogenetics to directly and dynamically manipulate gene expression in living cells. Optogenetics more broadly received major validation last week as the basis of the 2026 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.
Earlier this year, the company announced that its platform had reached a record-breaking productivity milestone of 21 g/L in a 15-day intensified fed-batch Chinese hamster ovary (CHO) cell line run for a monoclonal antibody. That tracks significantly above the industry standard of below 10 g/L, Prolific Machines pointed out at the time.
“It’s become very clear to us that people are very frustrated with the existing tools to control cells,” Deniz Kent, Ph.D., CEO and co-founder of Prolific Machines, said in an interview.
“We have this problem right now,” he continued, “where we have too many people that want better manufacturing tools.”
And while Prolific Machines may not be able to currently meet the level of demand it’s seeing, the expanded fundraising round has been deployed specifically to assist with the scale-up efforts that have now become necessary, Kent explained.
Aside from the extra capital, Prolific Machines has announced it’s also entering a strategic collaboration with Soon-Shiong’s healthcare umbrella organization NantWorks, with the goal to “apply Prolific's platform across biologic programs within NantWorks' portfolio of health and life sciences companies.”
"Prolific Machines is the most exciting advance I have seen in biopharma manufacturing in decades,” Soon-Shiong said in a statement Wednesday. “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 and its affiliate companies and Prolific working together on multiple fronts.”
Soon-Shiong and James Stewart, founder of Atoms & Bits and Level One Fund, will also be joining Prolific Machines’ board.
Prolific Machines’ funding round will help scale up work on the modular illuminator it has developed to help control cells through optogenetics.
The company’s modules incorporate many independently controllable LED lights, which are then fitted into aluminum bars that Kent referred to as “staves.” The staves can be added around the translucent bag in a traditional bioreactor setup, Kent explained, with the potential to add more of the modules on top of each other for larger-scale needs.
“What’s nice about this is that it means that you can illuminate any reactor,” Kent said. “It doesn’t matter what the size is, and it doesn’t matter what the brand is because all you have to do is change the number and the arrangement of the modules.”
With a focus on making its technology widely accessible and initially homing in on protein therapeutics and virus manufacturing—where Kent noted that the need for better tools is especially acute—“the ultimate goal with this is to be the infrastructure provider for all biological products,” he said.
“It’s not really a question of do people want this,’ Kent said of the need for better control over protein therapeutic and virus manufacturing. “It’s more a question of on what timeline will people be forced to do this.”
Meanwhile, in terms of the team growth Prolific Machines has in store, Kent noted that the next phase of the company’s work is to “really spread this across the world,” and to that end, the company will need a new roster of field scientists and field engineers, he explained.
The CEO described the roles as traveling jobs, in which the new workers will be moving from site to site to ensure hardware is working, that cell lines are functioning as intended and that the customers are happy.
The automation allure
Distinct from Prolific Machines’ raise, AI-powered automation specialist Multiply Labs last week announced its own $75 million series B, bringing its capital raised to more than $100 million over the past decade.
The latest round for the firm—which is using robotics to automate some of the most complex, manual biomanufacturing processes—was led by Soon-Shiong with NantWorks, with new investments coming on from Lingotto, Teradyne, and Strange Ventures and British Big Pharma AstraZeneca. Multiple returning supporters chipped into the fundraise, too, according to a release last week.
Multiply Labs’ work has previously garnered the attention of industry heavyweights like Thermo Fisher, Charles River and Legend Biotech. The company asserts that with its robotic approach to biologics manufacturing, it has the potential to reduce contamination, beef up capacity and, crucially, “close the gap between what AI can design and what patients can actually get.”
Multiply Labs said it would use the new cash to expand its production capacity, speed up its product roadmap and scale its team across roles encompassing engineering, regulatory and commercial.
“The world of physical AI biological manufacturing has arrived,” Soon-Shiong said in a statement announcing the raise.
“Manufacturing cell therapies is extraordinarily complex—every step must meet GMP standards when executing the intricate processes of cell manufacturing,” the entrepreneur continued. “Multiply Labs is building robots with the potential to change the speed and scale of these therapies for patients worldwide.”