California, US-based Aureka Biotechnologies, an artificial intelligence (AI)-native biotech startup looking to transform the therapeutic discovery process, has secured $100 million in its Series B funding round to fund the research and large-scale training of its next-generation biological foundation models.
The Series B round, which brought Aureka’s fundraising total, since its inception in 2023, to nearly $200 million, was structured in tranches. Granite Asia exclusively funded the first tranche, while an unnamed strategic investor led the subsequent tranche, with participation from China’s HighLight Capital (HLC) and follow-on investment from existing shareholders, including MPCi and NRL Capital.
Aureka plans to deploy the new financing primarily towards advancing its biological foundation models, including its flagship protein model, AuraIDE. The capital will also be used to upgrade its “Lab-in-the-Loop” platform—an experimental feedback engine that strengthens the closed-loop between those models and its proprietary single-cell functional screening, high-throughput experimental validation, and drug development platforms.
Led by its founder and CEO, Dr Weian Zhao, Aureka raised almost $100 million across its Series A and A+ rounds in November 2025 and this April, respectively.
HSG, formerly Sequoia China, led its $35-million Series A+ round, with participation from MPCi and BioTrack Capital. Earlier investors Qiming Venture Partners and NRL Capital also doubled down in the deal.
Unlike traditional drug discovery approaches that rely heavily on static public databases, its models receive experimental feedback from live drug discovery programmes and evolve through a continuous design–validation–learning cycle, a flywheel in which data, models, experiments and drug assets reinforce one another. This Lab-in-the-Loop mechanism allows Aureka to generate its own large-scale, information-dense functional experimental data for use in foundation model pre-training, reinforcement learning, and project-specific post-training.
The startup has established strategic partnerships with multiple global pharmaceutical companies to advance the development of differentiated antibody therapeutics.
“When leading biological foundation models are genuinely combined with R&D infrastructure that can run at scale, we are no longer simply making one step of drug discovery more efficient—we are building the next-generation drug discovery engine, one that can understand, generate and predict biological systems,” said Dr Zhao in a company statement. “This is a critical step in Aureka’s progress towards a biological world model.”
