bit.bio, a Cambridge company that programs human stem cells into defined cell types, has raised $25M in Series D funding from M&G Investments and Abcam founder Jonathan Milner.
The round follows a Series C earlier this year and lands on unusually concrete numbers for a life sciences tools company. Paid vial volumes are up 76% year to date in 2026, orders up 34% and active customers up 40%, including 63% growth among academic buyers.
The pitch is that AI has made drug candidates cheaper to generate than to test. Chief executive Emma Pepperell argues the industry has reached an inflection point where models accelerate discovery while pressure to replace animal testing grows, and both trends point at the same dependency.
Manufacturing capacity is already built, she said, so the money goes into breadth rather than steel. The company plans more cell types and wider access for pharmaceutical companies, biotechs and research groups.
bit.bio’s opti-ox platform forces a precise genetic program into induced stem cells, producing a repeatable cell type at scale. Donor-to-donor variation, the perennial complaint about primary human cells, is the target. The catalog now passes 50 cell types, spanning heart, liver and central nervous system models used in disease research, functional genomics, target work and toxicology.
Milner, who built Abcam into a global research reagent business, compared the opportunity to selling indispensable tools rather than discoveries. M&G’s Cornel Chiriac said the Crossover strategy backs companies with proven technology, established manufacturing and visible demand.
The bet is straightforward. If AI keeps inflating the number of molecules worth testing, whoever supplies the reproducible human tissue those assays run on collects a toll on every experiment.
