Zafrens Expands Investor Syndicate to Scale Revolutionary Drug Discovery Platform

SAN DIEGO, Feb. 4, 2025 /PRNewswire/ -- Zafrens, a pioneering biotech company transforming drug discovery, welcomes imec.xpand to its Series A syndicate, bringing the total capital raised to USD 31 million. imec.xpand is joined by existing investors Prime Movers Lab, Kofa Healthcare, and Global Brain in this financing.

Zafrens' breakthrough platform allows scientists to create and test hundreds of thousands of potential medicines in a single experiment – a dramatic improvement over traditional drug discovery methods. This innovative approach significantly reduces the time and cost of finding new treatments while providing deeper insights into how these drugs work.

"Our platform represents a fundamental shift in drug discovery," said Swamy Vijayan, CEO of Zafrens. "By creating and testing hundreds of thousands of potential drugs simultaneously and understanding exactly how they affect cells, we can identify the most promising treatments faster and with greater confidence in their safety. This means we can potentially bring life-changing drugs to patients more quickly and efficiently."

The company has already demonstrated the value of its platform through successful collaborations with several leading pharmaceutical companies, focusing on multiple classes of drugs. The new funding will enable Zafrens to expand its capacity and engage in additional partnerships with pharmaceutical companies worldwide.

"Zafrens exemplifies the kind of breakthrough innovation imec.xpand seeks to support," said Benoit Devogelaere, Partner at imec.xpand. "Their platform is fundamentally enabled through nanotechnology, and can accelerate the development of various types of modern medicines, from traditional small molecule drugs to advanced cell therapies and antibody treatments. We're excited to support their mission to transform how these new medicines are discovered."

For more information, please contact:
Swamy Vijayan, CEO
svijayan@zafrens.com

About Zafrens Zafrens is pioneering an ultra-high-throughput drug discovery platform to isolate, culture, image, and sequence hundreds of millions of cells per project. The proprietary Z-Screen platform transforms drug discovery by enabling a comprehensive analysis of therapeutic assets across efficacy, safety, and mechanism dimensions. Alongside developing an internal pipeline, Zafrens collaborates with leading pharmaceutical companies to accelerate breakthroughs in oncology, immunology, neuroscience, and more disease areas. For more information, visit www.zafrens.com.

About imec.xpand imec.xpand is one of the world's largest independent venture capital funds dedicated to early-stage semiconductor innovation. It targets ambitious deeptech start-ups where the knowledge, expertise and infrastructure of imec, the world-renowned semiconductor and nanotechnology R&D center, can play a determining role in their growth. imec.xpand has an outspoken international mindset towards building disruptive global companies and strongly believes that sufficient funding from the start is key to future success.

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SOURCE Zafrens