Watertown, Mass. — Portal Biotechnologies said it has closed an oversubscribed $9 million financing round led by NFX, with participation from existing investors including IA Ventures, Pear VC, Undeterred Ventures, IKJ Capital and TechU Ventures.
The company also announced commercial progress, expanded support from DARPA and broader adoption of its platform by pharmaceutical companies, academic centers and technology partners.
Portal is developing a cell engineering and drug discovery platform that uses mechanoporation to deliver RNA, gene editors, probes and other molecules into difficult-to-transfect cells across a range of cell types and workflows.
The company said the new funding will support commercial expansion of the Portal platform, which is designed to deliver complex molecules into cells safely and efficiently without compromising cell function.
Portal said its expansion efforts are focused on three areas: drug discovery workflows, multi-perturbation data generation for artificial intelligence, and next-generation cell therapies with academic and biopharma partners.
“Portal is achieving what very few biotech platforms manage in their first three years: meaningful commercial revenue, technical validation from the world’s largest companies, and a genuinely game-changing vision,” said Omri Amirav-Drory, Ph.D., General Partner at NFX Bio. “With an elegant, scalable engineering platform, Portal is perfectly positioned to underpin future drug discovery, TechBio, and cell therapy ecosystems. We are thrilled to lead this round and back the Portal team.”
Since its launch, Portal said its mechanoporation technology has been adopted by more than 100 customers, including public highlights involving Microsoft, Merck, AbbVie, Mass General Brigham, Ragon Institute and Purdue University.
The company said researchers at Merck, AbbVie and Purdue have presented applications of its platform in areas including screening impermeable degraders and peptide molecules, DNA-encoded library assays and target-engagement assays. Portal said multiple pharmaceutical customers have upgraded to its high-throughput Galaxy-i platform since its launch earlier this year.
Portal also said the Ragon Institute of Harvard, MIT and Mass General Brigham and Microsoft have committed to a two-year project using Portal’s technology to generate model training data and map immune responses at scale. Additional collaborations in multi-perturbation screens are also underway, according to the company.
In cell therapy, Portal said DARPA has expanded its initial $8 million contract to develop a portable, field-deployable device for rapid point-of-care cell therapy production. DARPA is also supporting commercialization through its Embedded Entrepreneur Initiative program.
Mass General Brigham recently presented data at the American Society of Gene and Cell Therapy meeting on the use of Portal’s platform for same-day, circRNA-based multifunctional CAR-T production, the company said.
“Portal unlocks many biology applications far beyond what has been feasible with existing technologies,” said Armon Sharei, Ph.D., Founder and CEO of Portal. “We’re excited to work with frontier partners to unlock new possibilities in cell engineering, drug discovery, and AI data generation.”
