Biotechnology company Scala Biodesign has raised US$16 million in a Series A funding round led by Grove Ventures, with support from TLV Partners, Deep Insight, and other investors.
The company also received a grant of NIS 15 million (around $4.8 million) from the Israel Innovation Authority.
The funding will help the company grow and speed up the development of its protein engineering software. According to Scala, its technology is already being used by 9 out of the world’s top 20 pharmaceutical companies.
Scala is building software based on over 10 years of research from the Weizmann Institute. This technology helps design proteins that are used in medicines, vaccines, and other biological products.
Traditionally, pharma and biotech companies create protein-based drugs through long and repeated lab experiments, which take a lot of time, cost a lot of money, and often fail. Scala’s platform aims to speed up this process, which usually takes years and requires huge investments.
“Having worked closely with the industry’s most advanced R&D teams, even the most sophisticated organizations are held back by the complexity of protein engineering,” said Dr. Ravit Netzer, Co-Founder and CEO of Scala Biodesign. “Today’s researchers are often forced into years of iterative, high-failure lab experiments simply because they lack the computational bandwidth to fully predict a candidate’s potential. At Scala, we are eliminating this bottleneck. By replacing traditional trial-and-error with a scalable, AI-driven platform, we empower scientists to turn complex engineering into a predictable, high-success engine, bringing life-saving medicines to market faster than ever imagined.”
“Improving the speed and reliability of protein design remains one of the most impactful opportunities in biotechnology,” said Renana Ashkenazi, Managing Partner at Grove Ventures. “Scala’s computational platform allows research teams to tackle protein engineering challenges earlier and more systematically within their own workflows. We believe this capability can materially accelerate development timelines across therapeutic and industrial programs.”
Founded in 2022 by Dr. Ravit Netzer and Dr. Adi Goldenzweig, the company was founded along with Chief Scientist Prof. Sarel Fleishman from the Weizmann Institute of Science, with a team of experts in protein engineering. Scala currently has 25 employees based in Tel Aviv.
Its platform has already been used by companies like Boehringer Ingelheim to improve and stabilize proteins that play a role in diseases. This helps in producing these proteins at scale while keeping them effective, making the drug discovery process faster and more efficient.
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