Graph Therapeutics, a next-generation biotech company based in Vienna, announced today the closing of a €3 million pre-seed financing round to finance the development of an AI-powered platform to bring the precision medicine paradigm to inflammation and immunology (I&I) drug discovery
The round was led by Squareone and Merantix Capital, with participation from NAVEC Investment Management and strategic angel investors such as Mehdi Ghissassi via the Atomico Angel Program.
“The complexity of inflammatory and immunological diseases demands a fundamentally different approach to drug discovery,” says Gregory Vladimer, PhD, CEO and co-founder of Graph. “Tackling immune-driven diseases and autoimmunity requires understanding and rebalancing intricate immune system networks. Our platform builds upon our team’s extensive experience in successfully applying AI approaches in precision oncology and immuno-oncology, and we have evolved our approach to meet the distinct challenges of immunologically driven diseases, to bring forward pre-clinical de-risking in the discovery timeline.”
Graph Therapeutics, founded in 2024 by Gregory Vladimer and Robert Sehlke, are developing a next-generation lab-in-the-loop AI platform to transform drug discovery in I&I. Building on the team’s previous success in pioneering AI approaches in precision oncology, Graph combines live patient cell approaches with machine learning to overcome the challenges of developing therapies for inflammatory diseases.
The team is made of techbio veterans that combine ex-vivo perturbation modelling, multimodal datasets, and advanced machine learning to identify clinically impactful drug targets and develop effective therapies for inflammatory diseases.
Dr. Vladimer previously served as CSO and scientific co-founder of Allcyte, and following its acquisition by Exscientia in 2021, served as Vice President of Translational Research and later led the Multimodal Discovery Lab. Graph’s CTO and co-founder, Robert Sehlke, PhD, spearheaded Allcyte’s computational platform development before leading Translational Bioinformatics at Exscientia.
Graph’s platform represents the result of a decade of work in combining complex primary patient disease models with AI to close the translational gap between pre-clinical models and patients in drug discovery.
“Having lived through multiple generations of techbio evolution, from Allcyte’s pioneering work in precision oncology through Exscientia’s end-to-end AI approach, we’ve gained unique insights into what truly drives success in this space,” says Vladimer. “Graph Therapeutics represents what we see as ‘Techbio 3.0’ – a model that maintains unwavering commitment to technological innovation and R&D, while recognizing that the most effective path to commercialization is through strategic partnerships with expert drug hunters. We’re moving beyond the traditional ‘tech-enabled biotech’ model to create something fundamentally different.”
According to Graph, the financing comes at a time when inflammation and immunology has emerged as a significant therapeutic area in biotech, with multiple new mechanisms being explored and considerable capital flowing into the space.
Graph’s platform aims to tackle the high failure rate of I&I drugs in clinical trials by providing higher clinical realism at the discovery stage, using the funding to advance its platform development and expand its team of computational and biological scientists.
While the company will initially focus on sterile inflammation, Graph’s ultimate goal is to develop more effective therapies against immune dysregulation from several related I&I diseases, representing combined market opportunities projected to exceed €249 billion by 2032 – as per comments by Graph.
