Fresh Series A funding backs a platform designed to help drugmakers cut years of trial and error from protein-based medicine development.
Scala Biodesign, a Tel Aviv-based biotech company building software for protein design, has raised $16 million in Series A financing to expand its platform, ScalaOS. The round was led by Grove Ventures, with participation from TLV Partners, Deep Insight, the Israel Innovation Authority and other investors, bringing the company’s total funding to $21.5 million since its 2022 launch [1].
At first glance, this may read like infrastructure news. Yet in an industry where the future of longevity increasingly depends on biologics, engineered enzymes, antibodies and complex therapies, infrastructure may be the headliner. Because a therapy can extend healthspan only if it first survives the lab.
A lot of the public conversation around longevity focuses on what comes later: clinical milestones, FDA pathways, breakthrough science, bold founder claims. However, drug development often slows down much earlier, in a less glamorous place: getting the biology to behave.
Proteins sit at the heart of many modern medicines. They are used in antibodies, vaccines, enzyme therapies and a growing list of advanced biologics. The problem is that natural proteins are not always built for the jobs scientists want them to do. They can be unstable, difficult to manufacture or simply underperform in real-world development. So researchers often end up in a long, expensive loop: adjust the protein, test it, find a flaw, try again.
Think of it like trying to build a key for a lock, except the shape keeps warping every time you make a copy. The science is possible, but the process can be painfully inefficient.
Scala’s pitch is that this should not take years of guesswork. ScalaOS is the company’s software platform for designing and optimizing proteins used in medicines, vaccines and industrial biotech. Rather than relying heavily on repeated wet-lab trial-and-error, Scala aims to help research teams make better design decisions earlier – before they burn time and money on experiments that go nowhere.
The company says the platform combines several layers of computation, including physics-based modeling, evolutionary data and AI models, to improve protein performance. It is trying to give scientists a much better first draft. Instead of making dozens of lab-based revisions, the goal is to arrive at something closer to “usable” on the first serious attempt.
“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, Scala Biodesign.
Netzer explains that researchers have historically been hindered by a lack of computational power, forcing them to conduct years of repetitive, often unsuccessful laboratory experiments. She asserts that Scala is removing this obstacle by substituting traditional trial-and-error methods with a scalable, AI-driven platform.
According to Scala’s CEO, this shift enables scientists to transform complex engineering into a predictable, highly successful process, ultimately accelerating the delivery of life-saving medicines to market.
What makes this financing more than just another AI-biotech funding round is the company’s early customer signal. Over the past eight months, nine of the world’s top 20 pharmaceutical companies and major chemical companies have onboarded ScalaOS. That is not the kind of adoption you usually see when a platform is still living mostly on promise.
In biotech, the real test is whether conservative, deeply process-driven organizations are willing to let that technology into their workflows. Large pharma does not move fast for novelty’s sake. If it adopts something, it usually sees a bottleneck worth removing.
Scala also highlighted its collaboration with Boehringer Ingelheim, where the platform helped stabilize several difficult drug targets in the company’s pipeline. According to the announcement, this led to targets expressed at higher levels and kept them active, making them more useful for downstream drug discovery.
The raw biological “starting material” became easier to work with and more likely to move forward instead of stalling out.
Why longevity should care
Longevity biotech is often framed around cellular reprogramming, senescent cell clearance, mitochondrial repair, gene therapies. However, behind many of those ambitions lies a more practical question: can we actually build these therapies well enough, cheaply enough and reliably enough to reach patients?
That is where companies like Scala become relevant. If the longevity sector is serious about moving from compelling mechanisms to scalable medicines, then better protein engineering should be a part of the plumbing. The field will need tools that make biologics easier to design, stabilize and manufacture – especially as therapies become more personalized and biologically complex.
