WhiteLab secures $26M to expand AI-designed gene delivery assets

AVP led the round, joined by new investors Yaday Health and Blast Club and existing shareholders Omnes Capital and Debiopharm Innovation Fund.

Why it matters: WhiteLab is building a business around the components of genomic medicines: vehicles that carry genetic material into cells and elements that control where and when a therapeutic gene is expressed. The financing will help establish whether its computational designs work in living systems.

• “The important distinction is that WhiteLab is not only providing technology or services to support other companies’ programs,” told David Del Bourgo, co-founder and CEO of WhiteLab Genomics, to European Biotechnology. “We are building a portfolio of validated assets that WhiteLab can own and license, and expanding that portfolio is one of the principal objectives of the Series B financing.”

How it works: WhiteLab’s ALFRED platform uses AI to design and optimize these components, which then undergo experimental testing. Its work started with adeno-associated viruses (AAVs) commonly used to deliver gene therapies and is now expanding into nonviral delivery technologies, including lipid nanoparticles, and synthetic promoters that control gene expression. The company’s term for the resulting products is “bio-assets.”

• “A bio-asset is a component of a genomic medicine that WhiteLab has designed and experimentally validated, together with the supporting data and intellectual property,” said Del Bourgo. “That could include a targeted delivery vector, such as an AAV, or a programmable regulatory element, such as a synthetic promoter.”

The business model: WhiteLab’s immediate strategy centers on owning enabling technologies that could serve multiple therapeutic applications, rather than taking complete medicines through development itself.

• “We can develop and validate these assets internally, as well as work with partners to create assets around specific biological or therapeutic objectives,” the company said. “This gives us a model that combines proprietary asset creation with long-term biopharma partnerships.”
• Those partnerships typically involve multiyear co-development, with work ranging from individual platform components to end-to-end design and validation. “Commercial structures can include milestone- or result-based payments as well as royalties,” explained Del Bourgo. Intellectual property and commercial rights vary with each collaboration’s scope.

The evidence so far: In studies conducted with the Paris Brain Institute, WhiteLab says its AI-designed AAVs crossed the blood-brain barrier and showed a strong brain-to-liver targeting ratio, with no detectable liver signal. That matters because an intravenously administered treatment for a brain disease needs to reach its target while limiting exposure elsewhere in the body.

• In an earlier interview with European Biotechnology Magazine, Del Bourgo said WhiteLab had designed a vector that was “50 times better than AAV9” and produced a liver signal 1,000 times lower than other profiles. He described a larger-animal study as the next research step.
• The company plans to present additional data from collaborations with Sanofi, Cytiva, the Paris Brain Institute and Institut Imagine at the upcoming European Society of Gene and Cell Therapy congress.

The big picture: WhiteLab’s plans fit a pattern in recent AI biotech financings: investors are backing the experiments needed to find out whether computational designs work in biology. Just looking back at September 2026, Swiss biotech Adaptyv raised $40 million to expand automated protein-testing labs and London-based Basecamp Research raised $140 million to expand its biological AI models and move a preclinical pipeline toward the clinic. The companies are tackling different problems, but each is investing in evidence beyond a model’s predictions.

What’s next: According to Del Bourgo, WhiteLab has more than 15 active programs, covering both internal projects and partner work. “Our focus is on advancing the strongest designs and generating the in vivo evidence needed to turn them into validated bio-assets,” he explained.

• According to Del Bourgo, the financing provides “more than two years of financial visibility” to expand validation and its proprietary portfolio. It will also support commercial expansion across North America, Europe and Asia, including stronger Boston operations and a growing presence on the U.S. West Coast.
• Looking ahead, Del Bourgo seems optimistic: “We’re in the strongest scientific position we’ve been in to date, and our priority now is generating the additional validation data needed to determine which candidates are ready to advance.”