The company's closed-loop platform is designed to dramatically speed up enzyme development for pharmaceuticals, sustainable chemicals and industrial biotech.
Manchester techbio Imperagen has closed a £5 million seed funding round led by PXN Ventures with participation from Imperagen’s existing investors IQ Capital and Northern Gritstone.
Established in 2021 by researchers from the Manchester Institute of Biotechnology, Imperagen is focused on accelerating the process of enzyme engineering. Serving diverse markets, from pharmaceutical manufacturing and life sciences to sustainable fine chemical production and industrial applications, we work hand-in-hand with our customers to de-risk and streamline their product development and fast-track their path to market.
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.
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.
Imperagen’s AI-guided closed-loop system improved the productivity of two enzymes by 677x and 572x, respectively, in just five rounds.
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.
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.
According to Dr Levy-Yurista:
“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.