ALP Bio Raises €1.9M for AI Drug Discovery Platform

Swiss biotech ALP Bio AG has raised €1.9M in pre-seed funding to predict immunogenicity risks earlier in biologics using AI and human immune organoids.

Swiss biotech startup ALP Bio AG has closed a €1.9 million pre-seed financing round to accelerate a platform that combines human immune organoid biology with generative AI technology designed to catch one of the drug industry’s most expensive problems years before it typically surfaces.

The round was led by Munich-based venture capital firm 42CAP, with co-investment from Venture Kick, Ajira Ventures and a group of strategic angel investors, the company announced Tuesday.

At the heart of ALP Bio’s work is a biological phenomenon called immunogenicity specifically, anti-drug antibody (ADA) responses. In short, when the human immune system mistakenly treats a biologic therapy as a threat, it can neutralize the drug, trigger safety concerns, or force developers to abandon entire programs.

What makes this particularly costly is when it tends to be discovered. Currently, most immunogenicity signals only emerge during clinical trials precisely when course corrections are the most expensive and the most damaging to timelines.

As a result, the biologics industry has, for decades, essentially treated late-stage immune failures as an unavoidable cost of doing business.

ALP Bio, founded in 2025 and headquartered in Schlieren, is building what it calls a hybrid platform to shift that dynamic dramatically earlier in the development process.

Rather than relying solely on computational prediction, the company’s approach starts in the lab. Its platform is built on human tonsil organoid technology living tissue constructs that replicate relevant immune activity in vitro, generating biologically meaningful signals before a drug candidate ever enters a human body. Those wet-lab readouts are then fed into machine learning models trained to support ADA risk stratification, lead candidate screening, and sequence optimization, all while preserving the molecule’s therapeutic function.

Our scientific conviction is that immunogenicity cannot be solved by computation alone. By combining human immune organoid readouts with AI, we can generate the type of biological feedback needed to make antibody design more informed, iterative and ultimately more useful for discovery and optimization teams.
Dr. Lucas Schaus, Chief Scientific Officer of ALP Bio AG

Practically speaking, the platform is intended to give antibody development teams an earlier, clearer picture of immune risk so that decisions about which candidates to advance, modify, or drop can be made at a stage when the cost of changing course is still manageable.

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According to the company, the preclinical antibody development market is forecast to reach $4.0 billion in 2026 and expand to $11.1 billion by 2036, advancing at a compound annual growth rate of 10.8%, driven largely by pharma’s accelerating shift toward antibody-based therapeutics. Yet despite that growth, immunogenicity remains one of the highest drivers of clinical attrition across the industry.

Immunogenicity is one of the largest hidden costs in biologics, and the industry has accepted late-stage surprises as the norm for too long. We believe this risk should be measured and reduced years earlier than it is today. This financing lets us scale the experimental and computational foundation of our platform and partner with teams who want to make antibody development more predictable from the start.
Dr. Christian Vahlensieck, CEO of ALP Bio AG

Thomas Wilke, Partner at lead investor 42CAP, drew a direct comparison to a previous generational shift in drug discovery when commenting on the investment.

According to ALP Bio, the pre-seed capital will be deployed across three priorities: expanding immune organoid lab capacity and increasing automation and throughput; launching early pharmaceutical partner collaborations focused on antibody immunogenicity risk; and growing scientific and commercial teams across Switzerland and San Diego, California.

The startup is already working with pharmaceutical and biotech partners through early-access programs, helping improve candidate selection and de-risk development pipelines ahead of broader commercial launch.

ALP Bio’s raise comes amid a broader 2026 funding wave in AI-enabled drug discovery and human-relevant preclinical biology. Comparable Swiss activity includes Zurich-based Rivia’s €13 million Series A for clinical trial data infrastructure and Geneva-based FluoSphera’s €1.23 million raise for human-relevant drug discovery tools, signaling that Swiss biotech infrastructure investment extends well beyond therapeutic assets alone.

Together, these rounds point to over €62 million in 2026 funding across comparable BioTech, BioIT and AI drug discovery companies, reflecting sustained investor confidence in tools that bring earlier, more reliable signal into the development process.

ALP Bio AG is a Schlieren, Switzerland-based biotech company founded in 2025. The company develops an immune organoid and AI platform to help antibody developers identify, understand and reduce immunogenicity risk earlier in drug development. For more information, visit alp.bio.

Disclaimer: This news is based on publicly available information. NervNow has not verified it independently.

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