A Manchester-based techbio company using AI and quantum physics to engineer better enzymes faster, has closed a £5 million seed funding round led by PXN Ventures with participation from Imperagen's existing investors IQ Capital and Northern Gritstone.
The raise brings Imperagen's total funding to £8.5 million and will accelerate research and development, expand its wet lab capabilities, and build out its go-to-market function over the next 18 months.
Coinciding with the round Guy Levy-Yurista, PhD joins as CEO. An experienced technology and life sciences executive with two successful exits across the US and Europe, he brings a track record of scaling deep tech businesses from early stage to market leadership.
Enzymes are biological catalysts used to reduce waste, lower energy usage and decrease overall production costs in everything from pharmaceutical manufacturing and personal care to sustainable chemical production. However, engineering an enzyme for practical application is a challenging and complex process. Traditional approaches rely on manual screening, a slow and expensive process with a low hit rate. More recently, zero-shot methods have promised smart designs but often fall short when deployed in real world conditions. Neither method gives industrial customers the predictability and speed they need to de-risk product development at scale.
Imperagen's proprietary platform combines three stages into a single closed-loop system:
Quantum physics simulates millions of mutation combinations in silico, generating a rich dataset of predicted properties.
Those outputs are used to train problem-specific AI models, not general-purpose ones, calibrated to the precise engineering challenge at hand.
Automated robotics then test the highest-performing predictions in the physical lab, producing high-quality experimental data that feeds directly back into the AI model, so that it continuously evolves.
That feedback loop is what sets the approach apart, with each round of experiments making the next round more targeted. The system learns from the wet lab as it goes, narrowing in on the highest-performing variants with each iteration. The result is a platform that gets smarter round by round. This is the future of biocatalysis, a recursive, self improving AI platform to help rewrite chemical reactions.
The company has already worked on a number of significant projects, including with a Fortune 500 personal care company looking to launch a new product line. Imperagen's AI-guided closed loop system improved the productivity of two enzymes by 677x and 572x respectively in just five rounds.
Commenting on the news, Dr. Levy-Yurista said: "What I see right now is that the companies that will make a radical difference in this emerging AI-driven future are all AI-native, lean on real world data, have genuine impact, and are fundamentally deep tech. Imperagen has each of those characteristics, combining them with outstanding people, phenomenal technology and the undeniable swagger you only get from Manchester. It was a no-brainer to join the team and lead this next stage in its growth."
The funds will be used to accelerate the core R&D platform, scale the wet lab operation, and grow the in-house AI team, both human and agentic. Imperagen will also invest in its go-to-market function to convert growing commercial interest into contracted revenue across its target sectors: pharmaceuticals, life sciences, personal care, sustainable fine chemicals, and industrial biotech.
Sim Singh-Landa, Investment Director at PXN, said: "The North West's life sciences ecosystem is becoming stronger all the time and stands to gain from Imperagen's local hiring and growth plans, building on the company's connection to the University of Manchester's Manchester Institute of Biotechnology [google.com]. We're excited to be supporting Imperagen with investment from both the GMC Life Sciences Fund and our NPIF II fund, as the company looks to scale success in enzyme engineering and deliver progress within the life sciences sector, which is one of the key sectors highlighted in the UK Government's Modern Industrial Strategy."
Imperagen was founded in November 2021 by Dr Andrew Almond, Dr Andrew Currin and Dr Tim Eyes, all researchers from the University of Manchester's Manchester Institute of Biotechnology.
PXN invested via the GMC Life Sciences Fund By PXN Ventures, which it manages on behalf of the Bruntwood SciTech, Enterprise Cheshire + Warrington and Greater Manchester Combined Authority . Investment has also come from NPIF II - PXN Equity Finance, which is managed by PXN as part of the Northern Powerhouse Investment Fund II (NPIF II).
