WhiteLab Genomics Raises $26M to Scale AI-designed Delivery Systems for Cell and Gene Therapies

Techbio company WhiteLab Genomics has raised a $26 million Series B to develop and license its own AI-designed gene delivery technologies, moving beyond the computational services business it started with.

Founded in 2019 by David Del Bourgo and Julien Cottineau and later accelerated through Y Combinator, WhiteLab operates from Paris and Boston. The company says it has more than 15 internal and partnered programs underway. It plans to use the Series B to validate its viral and non-viral delivery technologies and programmable payloads in vivo, while expanding its commercial operations in North America, Europe and Asia.

The round, announced on October 6, was led by AVP, an independent global investment platform managing more than €2.5 billion in assets. New investors Yaday Health and Blast Club, a French platform that allows individual investors to back startups, also participated. Existing shareholders Omnes Capital and the Debiopharm Innovation Fund, which co-led WhiteLab's $10 million Series A in September 2022, returned for the round. WhiteLab has now raised about $37 million in total and says the new financing provides two to three years of runway.

Two of the new investors will join the board: François Robinet, managing partner of AVP, and Dr. Daniel Teper, managing partner of Yaday Health and founder and CEO of NAYA Therapeutics.

The result that anchors the round

One of WhiteLab's most important results so far is an AI-designed AAV capsid that reached the brain in mice after intravenous administration.

Working with Dr. Françoise Piguet's GENOV laboratory at the Paris Brain Institute, WhiteLab used its ALFRED platform (AI-Led Framework for Rational Exploration in Drug Design) to design novel adeno-associated virus capsids. In wild-type mice dosed intravenously, the candidates produced 50-fold higher brain DNA enrichment than AAV9, a commonly used comparator. WhiteLab reported no detectable liver signal and has described the reduction in liver exposure as roughly 1,000-fold.

WhiteLab says it designed the capsids against cell-surface receptors rather than generating large random libraries and screening them for useful candidates, a common approach to AAV capsid discovery. The resulting capsids also have highly novel sequences. The company argues that this gives it stronger intellectual property and more freedom to operate, both for its own programs and for companies that license its technology. That could be commercially important because ownership of AAV capsid sequences and related technologies has become a heavily contested area of gene therapy IP.

"Crossing the blood-brain barrier without surgery has been one of the biggest unsolved problems in genomic medicine," Del Bourgo said of the findings, which were presented at the ASGCT Annual Meeting.

The results are still early. The experiments were performed in wild-type mice, and many AAV capsids that work well in mice fail to reproduce the same targeting in non-human primates. One reason is that the receptor interaction responsible for a capsid's performance in mice may not work the same way in another species. WhiteLab says larger-animal studies are underway. The company also expects to present additional data from work with Sanofi, Cytiva, the Paris Brain Institute and Institut Imagine at the ESGCT annual congress.

The layer everyone skips

Much of the recent progress in genomics has focused on technologies for reading or editing DNA: large perturbation datasets, increasingly modular CRISPR systems, cheaper genome sequencing and new DNA synthesis methods. None of those technologies solves the problem of getting a therapeutic payload into the right cells.

That remains a major limitation for in vivo gene and cell therapies. Lipid nanoparticles preferentially accumulate in the liver, which is one reason many of the first in vivo gene-editing programs have targeted liver diseases. AAV9 can reach the central nervous system, but not efficiently enough for many applications after conventional intravenous administration. Clinical programs have therefore used intrathecal or intracisternal administration, or very high systemic doses that can create additional safety risks.

The delivery system can therefore determine whether an otherwise promising therapeutic approach is practical. More precise gene editors are of limited use if they cannot reach the tissue where the disease needs to be treated.

WhiteLab is trying to solve that problem by designing delivery systems with specific tissue targets. If its capsids can reproduce their mouse results in larger animals and eventually humans, they could be licensed to companies that already have therapeutic payloads but lack an efficient way to deliver them. A brain-targeting capsid with low liver exposure, for example, could potentially be paired with several different CNS gene therapy programs rather than developed as a single drug.

WhiteLab is also expanding ALFRED beyond AAV capsids. The company is applying the platform to lipid nanoparticles and programmable payloads, including synthetic promoters that determine where and when a transgene is expressed. Its longer-term approach is to design several parts of the delivery system together rather than optimizing the vector and expression controls independently.

Whether that produces better therapeutics still needs to be demonstrated experimentally. But if it works, it could also make WhiteLab's technology more difficult to replace than a platform that designs only one component.

From platform to bio-assets

The Series B also marks a change in WhiteLab's business model. The company began primarily as a computational services business, providing partners with in silico target discovery, vector and payload design, and genotoxicity assessment. It now wants to own validated delivery technologies that can be licensed to pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies.

"We specialize in what we're very good at doing," Del Bourgo told Axios: "bringing preclinical assets to their highest validation level, then partnering with pharma." Robinet described the model more directly: "You get paid for the platform and for success in drug development."

The difference is important financially. Services generate revenue from individual projects. A licensed capsid can generate upfront payments, development milestones and potentially royalties from drugs that use it.

Dyno Therapeutics provided a recent example of the model when Astellas exercised a license in April for an AI-designed capsid targeting skeletal muscle. WhiteLab is pursuing a similar opportunity: develop and validate delivery components far enough for pharmaceutical companies to license them, without taking the resulting drugs through clinical development itself.

That distinction also matters given WhiteLab's size. With about $37 million raised to date, financing multiple clinical programs independently would require far more capital. Licensing preclinical delivery assets allows the company to participate in the economics of drug development without paying for the entire process.

WhiteLab's existing partnerships show where the business stands today:

WhiteLab plans to expand its Boston operation to support more North American partnerships, establish a presence on the US West Coast, and pursue business in Japan and South Korea. Axios reports that Del Bourgo "says he is open to being acquired, and that WhiteLab has been approached by potential buyers, but would also consider a U.S. IPO."

A crowded frontier, and a sobering precedent

WhiteLab is one of several companies using machine learning to design AAV capsids. ASGCT 2026 featured AAVATAR's closed-loop AI capsid platform, Voyager's work on AI-designed antibody-evading capsids, and GenixCure's AI-guided neuron-targeted vectors. Other companies are pursuing similar delivery goals without positioning AI as the central technology. Affinia's ATC-134 and Amyloid Solution's ACE-502, for example, have both shown broad CNS transduction with reduced liver exposure in non-human primates. Dyno also introduced two new capsids and an AI platform at the meeting.

WhiteLab has so far disclosed mouse data, while several competing programs have already reported results in non-human primates. That does not mean WhiteLab's capsids will perform worse, but it does mean they are at an earlier stage of validation.

The next important test is whether the brain targeting and reduced liver exposure seen in mice can be reproduced in larger animals. This has been a persistent problem in capsid development. A vector can perform extremely well in mice and then lose much of that advantage in primates because the biological mechanism responsible for its targeting differs between species.

The risks of CNS delivery are also not limited to whether a vector reaches the brain.

Capsida Biotherapeutics developed intravenously administered capsids designed to cross the blood-brain barrier and advanced CAP-002 into the clinic for STXBP1-related developmental and epileptic encephalopathy. The first and only patient dosed in the SYNRGY trial died in September 2025. The study was paused and subsequently placed on clinical hold.

In a May 11, 2026 letter to the patient community, Capsida said the autopsy identified cerebral edema as the cause of death but "did not identify the underlying reason for this occurrence." The company decided to close the trial and has continued investigating the event, including the role of ADAM15, the protein used by the capsid to enter the brain.

A single patient death with an unresolved mechanism does not establish that brain-targeting capsids as a class are unsafe. But it does show why delivery efficiency and safety have to be evaluated separately.

WhiteLab's lack of detectable liver signal in its mouse experiments is encouraging because high hepatic exposure is a known problem with systemic AAV delivery. It does not establish the safety of delivering large amounts of vector to the brain. That will require separate toxicology and eventually clinical data.

What to watch

Four upcoming results should make it easier to judge whether WhiteLab's Series B is producing meaningful progress.

1. The ESGCT data. The main question is whether WhiteLab presents results beyond wild-type mice and whether the reported brain-to-liver advantage remains at doses relevant to therapeutic development.

2. A large-animal readout. Non-human primate data will be an important test of the capsid platform. Reproducing the mouse results in primates would provide much stronger evidence that WhiteLab's rational-design approach can generate vectors that translate across species.

3. The first capsid license. WhiteLab's shift from services to owned bio-assets will become much more tangible once a pharmaceutical or biotechnology company licenses an ALFRED-designed component with development milestones or royalties attached. Dyno's agreement with Astellas provides a useful comparison.

4. Data on the broader platform. WhiteLab is positioning ALFRED as more than an AAV capsid design system. Evidence that it can improve LNPs and synthetic promoters, or design several components of a delivery system together, would support that broader claim.

Delivery also remains an important gap in the wider genomics market. Our own Five Genomics Watchpoints for 2026 focused on data generation, gene editing, embryo scoring, sequencing costs and DNA synthesis. All of those areas have continued to improve.

But cheaper sequencing and better editing do not solve the problem of delivering a therapy to the right cells. If tissue-specific delivery improves, many existing gene-editing and gene-therapy technologies become useful in diseases they cannot currently reach. That is the opportunity WhiteLab is trying to address with this round.

Topic: Biotech Ventures