Artificial intelligence is fundamentally changing how software is built, deployed, and managed. AI coding assistants are helping developers ship software faster than ever. Meanwhile, a new generation of AI-powered Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) tools promises to help organizations respond to incidents and recover from outages in record time. But there’s a problem with this approach: […]

Anorak, a London-Chengdu entertainment tech company with the vision of “making any pursuit playable”, today announced a $5 million pre-seed round co-led by Play Ventures and Backed VC, with participation from Supercell and MTG.

Anorak is led by CEO Shaun Rutland, who co-founded Hutch – the mobile automotive games studio behind Top Drives and F1 Clash, acquired by MTG in 2020 – and Chief Creative Officer Jonathan Alpine, a founding employee at Hutch and its former Chief Creative Officer.  They are joined by co-founder Tak Fung, Chief of AI, who leads Anorak's AI lab in Chengdu, China.

The company, which began as a generative video research project, now has a 20-strong team across London and Chengdu, developing proprietary inference technology to make generative video faster, cheaper and more controllable, progressively enabling games and experiences to shift from pre-generated to generative, real-time interaction.

The company's medium is interactive generative video – generative video, made playable. Rather than simply prompting its way to new AI-bolstered versions of existing games, Anorak is building new play patterns from scratch, and the platform to go with them. It’s a platform where generated video responds to user choices and inputs in real time. The model pairs human creativity and playfulness with agentic ingenuity and visualisation to establish an entirely new entertainment medium; one that is playable, watchable, and shareable.

At Hutch, the team learned how deep a single subculture can run. Car enthusiasts didn't just play – they obsessed over details, built communities and held each game to their own standards. Anorak takes that lesson and applies it to every subculture there is: anglers, sneakerheads, padel players, birdwatchers, K-pop fans, and thousands of communities no publisher would ever greenlight a game for. 

Generative media changes the economics of serving these communities. Anorak will bring its interactive format to increasingly wider and specific interests, making entertainment viable for audiences that traditional game production economics have left underserved.

The aim is to hand those tools to real-world communities, so they can make playable content for themselves – shaped by their own in-jokes, rituals and taste, not a boardroom's guess at what a mass market wants. When anyone can make anything, Anorak believes taste becomes the scarce asset, and the communities that hold it should not only steer what is created, but become the creators.

Anorak is releasing new playable experiments on its blog every week, with plans to launch a creator platform that will enable anyone to realise their ideas.

It won't be a traditional chatbot that turns a prompt into a game. Anorak believes creation should be as much fun as playing – it's about having fun making fun.

According to Shaun Rutland, CEO and co-founder, Anorak:

"Every time making got cheaper – in music, film and games – value moved to whoever had the taste to filter the flood. Generative is the biggest of those shifts yet, because almost anyone can now create. 
Anorak is about giving every community that power: real people making playable things for the people they actually care about."

According to Harri Manninen, Founding Partner, Play Ventures, Anorak is at the forefront of building a new form of interactive entertainment, turning generative video into experiences people can play, watch and share. 

“What makes the vision especially compelling is the opportunity not only to build for passionate communities, but to empower those communities to create entertainment around their own interests. 

Shaun, Jonathan and Tak combine a proven track record in entertainment with deep AI expertise, exactly the kind of team we want to back at the beginning of a new technology cycle.”

Alex Brunicki, Founding Partner, Backed VC, contends that most AI entertainment companies are using new tools to make old formats faster. 

“Anorak is asking a far more interesting question: what does entertainment look like when content is made by and for a community, especially if we shift away from the skeuomorphism that other companies are still approaching the space with?

Furthermore, the technical breakthroughs the team have made in the past 12 months make us extremely excited for what comes next with Anorak."

The funding will expand the London and Chengdu teams, bring the first playable formats to release, and establish the creator platform in early 2027.

Every company needs to attack its own systems with AI hacking tools within about 90 days, or hackers will get in first. That is the warning from Alex Stamos, chief security officer at Cognition. He told Nilay Patel on The Verge’s Decoder podcast that open-weight AI models now give low-skilled attackers much of the skill […]

AJ Agrawal has a habit of making bold calls about where business is headed. His predictions have been published in Forbes, CNN, Inc. Magazine, Fortune, Fast Company and Entrepreneur.com. He has also built and sold companies of his own, so he writes from the operator’s seat. His newest prediction is a contrarian one. Most enterprises […]

US big-hitting VCs Lightspeed and Alphabet's CapitalG have backed UK chip startup Fractile in a £500m-plus funding round, which values the startup at over £5bn, the UK government said today in a press release.

The UK Nvidia challenger, based in Bristol and London, designs chips for AI inference, the process of running an AI model.

Founded in 2022 by Oxford PhD Walter Goodwin, Fractile’s architecture keeps data directly on the chip, unlike standard chips that must constantly shuttle data between the processor and separate memory modules. It says this method can run LLMs up to a hundred times faster than existing hardware while lowering operational costs by 90 per cent. Fractile's specialised chips are set to be ready for data centre deployment next year.

The lead invesetors in the Series C round, some of which has previously been reported, are Thrive Capital, Peter Thiel's Founders Fund, Lightspeed, and Redpoint. The UK’s Sovereign AI fund, the British Business Bank, Shopify, Balderton, Dragoneer and Blackrock also featured in the round, which Fractile said amounted to around £540m.

It follows its $220m Series B, which it announced in May this year, led by Accel, Factorial Funds, and Founders Fund. The Series B funding round valued Fractile at around £820m.

The investment comes as the UK looks to become a leader in parts of the AI stack and build up its sovereign capabilities in critical technologies, reducing dependence on fragile overseas supply chains.

AI minister Kanishka Narayan said: “For too long, Britain has produced some of the world’s best scientific ideas, only to see too much of the technology, industry and wealth they create built elsewhere. We are determined to change that. If AI is going to serve the British people, strengthen our public services and create good jobs across the country, Britain needs to build more of the technology that powers it.

“Fractile represents the very best of British ambition, bringing together world-class chip design, engineering and AI expertise to develop faster, cheaper and more energy-efficient hardware.”

Marketers now have to sell to two audiences, and one of them is not human, Gamma’s Kristin Fracchia told TNW. AI is more and more an intermediary in the buying process, she said. “For all of human history, marketers have marketed to other humans, which means appealing to human psychology. Now you have a second […]

Torus, a Salt Lake City maker of energy storage systems, has raised $500m and launched Foundry, prefabricated units that bring AI computing to existing business and factory sites using grid power they already have. Magnetar led the round, the company said in a statement on Wednesday. ICONIQ, Origin Ventures, Ridgeline Partners, and Trinity Capital also […]

Creator advertising platform Tano has raised $4 million in a seed funding round led by Cherry Ventures, bringing its total funding to $5 million following earlier backing from Seedcamp and The Players Fund.

Founded by Will Caplan and Sagar Shah, Tano develops an AI-powered platform designed to help brands manage creator partnerships and turn influencer marketing into a more scalable and measurable advertising channel.

As consumer attention increasingly shifts towards content creators, brands are investing more in influencer marketing to reach audiences and drive sales. However, managing large numbers of creator partnerships remains complex and resource-intensive, requiring brands to identify suitable creators, coordinate campaigns, manage payments and measure performance. Traditional agency models can make smaller partnerships particularly expensive, limiting opportunities to work with a broader network of creators.

Tano aims to address these challenges by combining AI agents with creator strategists to streamline different stages of creator advertising. Its platform handles creator recruitment, product seeding, communication, rewards and payments, allowing brands to run ongoing campaigns across thousands of relationships rather than relying on individual partnerships.

The system also uses campaign performance data to improve creator selection and engagement over time. Through tracking links, discount codes and commerce integrations, brands can measure the impact of creator activity on sales, while selected content can be repurposed for paid advertising with the necessary permissions.

Will Caplan, co-founder and CEO of Tano, said:

Brands should be able to set a commercial objective and invest predictably into creator advertising, just like they invest in Meta or Google. 

Our vision is to build the world’s largest advertising channel for commerce, powered by people. We want to harness millions of creative minds without losing the individual perspectives that make their content valuable. That is The Creator Advertising Platform we’re building.

The new funding will be used to hire additional engineers and creator strategists, supporting further development and improvement of Tano's platform as the company works to scale its creator advertising operations.

Biscay (Bizkaia), in Spain’s Basque Country, is building on its industrial heritage to develop a startup ecosystem spanning biotechnology, advanced manufacturing, energy and emerging technologies.

With public investment, R&D incentives and collaboration between businesses, research institutions and government agencies, the region is positioning itself as a destination for deeptech innovation.

I recently attended BIOSPAIN 2026 in Bilbao, where I explored the region's approach to supporting startups, its advantages, and the challenges that remain.

Building on industrial and life sciences expertise

Biscay is home to more than 300 companies, 20 research centres, four universities and leading hospitals, forming an ecosystem that generates more than €9.4 billion and supports 62,000 jobs.

The region is a major hub for the Basque Country's life sciences sector, accounting for 45 per cent of its companies and 56 per cent of revenues. Its more than 135 life sciences companies support over 27,000 jobs and generate €5.2 billion in revenue, with particular strengths in biomanufacturing and advanced therapies.

Investment continues across biotechnology, aerospace, advanced manufacturing, renewable energy and robotics.

A major bioscience and healthcare project led by I+Med will involve €72 million in investment over three years, including €28 million for R&D, and is expected to create more than 600 jobs.

The region also offers a competitive tax regime and financial incentives. Investors in innovative companies can benefit from a 35 per cent personal income tax deduction. In comparison, capital gains on exit are eligible for a 50 per cent exemption, rising to 100 per cent if reinvested in startups or technology ventures.

Professionals relocating from abroad can receive a tax exemption on up to 50 per cent of their salary for 11 years.

Companies can also access tax deductions of up to 70 per cent for R&D activities and 15–20 per cent for technological innovation.

Alongside financial incentives, Biscay has invested in specialist infrastructure, including the Energy Intelligence Centre, Basque Hydrogen Corridor, Automotive Intelligence Centre and Bizkaia Quantum Advanced Industries initiative.

An intentional approach to supporting startups

During my time in Biscay, I spoke with Olatz Goitia Urkiaga, Director General of the economic development agency BEAZ, Oscar Ugarte, Director of Seed Capital Bizkaia and Amaia Jugo, Managing Director of Bizkaia Talent .

For Goitia, one of Biscay's distinguishing features is the collaboration between public organisations, each contributing different expertise and resources.

Alongside BEAZ and Seed Capital Bizkaia, these include the provincial tax authorities and Lantik, the Provincial Council's technology company. Lantik supports access to advanced technological infrastructure, including quantum technologies, while the tax authorities can introduce measures to attract businesses and investors. Seed Capital Bizkaia provides financing and investor networks, while BEAZ offers business development and innovation support.

"What makes the system work is bringing these organisations together around the needs of companies," Goitia explains.

"These departments don't necessarily work together in the same way elsewhere. Here, we've developed relationships that allow us to coordinate their activities and provide more comprehensive support."

For a relatively small region, she believes this collaborative approach can make a significant difference in helping startups establish themselves and grow.

The support is structured around different stages of company development.

• Entrepreneurs can access grants of up to €60,000 to validate ideas through prototyping, market testing and commercial analysis.
• Once a business is ready to launch, the Creation of Innovative Companies programme provides grants of up to €85,000 towards incorporation, intellectual property, premises and specialist recruitment.
• For companies ready to scale, Seed Capital Bizkaia, the provincial government's venture-capital company, provides financing through participating loans and equity investment.

Public and private capital: A different approach to startup funding

Founded in 1989,

was established when few organisations were willing to take the risks of investing in early-stage companies. According to its Director Ugarte, its approach combines public and private capital, with banks participating both as shareholders and co-investors in its funds.

"What makes us distinctive is that we combine public and private capital. Banks are among our shareholders, and they also participate as co-investors in our funds," he explains.

The organisation manages investment instruments spanning seed funding, growth capital and social impact, alongside a crowdfunding platform.

"Our role is to take risks that other investors might not be prepared to take, while bringing private capital into the ecosystem."

Seed Capital Bizkaia typically provides around 40 to 50 per cent of a funding round, with private investors covering the remainder. Ugarte says the organisation is also willing to experiment with financing models that might seem unusual for a public institution.

"When we speak to other public administrations in Europe, we sometimes realise that we're doing things quite differently.

Sometimes we take approaches that might seem unusual for a public institution. But the objective is to respond quickly and provide practical support."

Crowdfunding brings local investors into the ecosystem.

One example is Seed Capital Bizkaia's crowdfunding platform, established in 2019 to let ordinary citizens help finance local projects. The platform focuses on innovative businesses and projects delivering positive environmental or social impact. Its current approach centres on lending, with financing rounds typically ranging from €100,000 to €200,000. Ugarte says demand has been encouraging:

"We recently completed a round in just eight minutes. People are waiting for opportunities to invest because they're interested in the projects and the returns."

Beyond raising capital, the platform introduces residents to innovative companies operating nearby that they might otherwise never encounter. "We see it as a combination of financial participation, community engagement and promoting local talent," he says.

From industrial innovation to GovTech

Biscay's industrial base also provides opportunities for startups developing technologies for established sectors, particularly energy, automotive and healthcare. Ugarte says the region's research institutions, hospitals and industrial expertise have helped establish a strong foundation for innovation.

"We started supporting health and biotech projects around 30 years ago. We have universities, doctors, researchers and healthcare institutions that provide a strong foundation for innovation."

Seed Capital Bizkaia typically backs one to three new healthcare projects annually, although biotechnology requires a longer investment horizon.

Beyond industry, Biscay is encouraging startups to develop solutions for public administration through a GovTech initiative that has been running for around three years. One of the biggest challenges, Goitia says, has been changing how government departments approach procurement and innovation.

"Public administrations are accustomed to buying existing products and services. But sometimes those solutions don't meet their needs."

The initiative encourages departments to identify problems and explore whether startups could develop more effective solutions. This has involved training public-sector teams, including procurement staff, to work differently with innovative companies.

"We now identify around three to five public-sector challenges each year. The idea is to give innovative companies opportunities to develop solutions to real problems within public administration."

From startup to scaleup: Closing the funding gap

Despite its support for early-stage companies, helping startups scale remains a challenge, particularly for those moving into industrial production, much like elsewhere in Europe.

Goitia acknowledges:

"The challenge comes when they need to scale, particularly when that involves industrial production. That's an area where we still need to strengthen the ecosystem."

Ugarte, however, argues that Biscay's comparatively affordable talent and research infrastructure give companies a reason to maintain their operations in the region:

"If you compare the cost of operating here with somewhere like Boston, the difference can be significant. Boston has access to enormous amounts of investment capital, but companies also face much higher costs for talent and infrastructure."

Seed Capital Bizkaia is also building international investor relationships through its fund-of-funds activities, including investments in funds in Estonia and Portugal.

The aim is to connect local companies with specialist investors and create relationships that can bring additional capital and expertise into the region.

"We've spent years developing these relationships, and that makes a real difference. It's not simply about having funding available. It's about helping companies access the knowledge, partnerships and infrastructure they need."

Attracting international talent — and giving people reasons to stay

Access to skilled workers is another priority. Bizkaia Talent is a nonprofit initiative backed by the Provincial Council of Bizkaia and leading Basque companies and universities, working to attract, develop and retain highly skilled professionals.

According to its managing director, Amaia Jugo, the organisation works closely with employers to understand their recruitment needs and supports international professionals considering relocation.

"We work with a wide range of businesses, particularly SMEs, which have very different needs. We also help professionals who are considering moving to Bizkaia for work.

However, support goes beyond finding employment to support with practical matters such as housing, schools and other services people need when relocating.

"The goal isn’t simply to attract professionals to the region, but to help them settle here and encourage them to stay."

The region's industrial economy creates particular demand for specialised technical skills, including industrial automation.

Bizkaia Talent is developing initiatives to connect employers with qualified professionals from countries such as Colombia and Peru, where skilled workers may have fewer local employment opportunities. It also supports pathways from education into industry, including placements that allow international students to gain work experience with local companies.

Jugo emphasises the importance of designing these initiatives around employers' actual needs.

"Sometimes public institutions develop programmes without listening closely enough to the people they're supposed to support. We try to do the opposite."

Companies that have established operations in Biscay include Woza Labs, a climate tech startup that relocated from London to Bilbao and uses AI-driven climate modelling to help companies such as Iberdrola strengthen electricity grids against extreme weather.

Another is Satlantis, an Earth observation company founded in Florida that subsequently established its headquarters in Biscay while retaining US operations. Its technology provides high-resolution satellite imaging for applications including methane emissions detection. ​

Biscay startups to watch

Cocoon Bioscience

Founded in 2022 as a spin-off from Spanish biotech company Algenex, Cocoon Bioscience uses insects in their chrysalis stage as natural bioreactors to manufacture proteins.

Its CrisBio platform produces recombinant proteins, including enzymes and growth factors used in pharmaceuticals, life sciences and cultivated meat. 

In September 2024, Cocoon opened a 4,000-square-metre manufacturing facility at the Bizkaia Technology Park in Derio, with an initial annual production capacity of five kilograms of recombinant proteins and the potential to scale beyond 20 kilograms.

Fisify

Fisify develops digital physiotherapy solutions combining AI with the expertise of qualified physiotherapists.

Its AI-powered virtual physiotherapist, Aurya, uses computer vision to analyse movements, measure range of motion and provide real-time feedback on exercises.

The platform adapts programmes to users' progress, while human physiotherapists monitor recovery.

Fisify works with businesses, insurers and physiotherapy professionals to improve access to rehabilitation and injury prevention.

Gloop

Gloop is a Spanish foodtech startup developing edible alternatives to single-use plastic cutlery. Its products include plant-based spoons, straws and coffee stirrers designed to remain functional during use before being eaten like a biscuit.

Gloop's straws can withstand up to 80 minutes in cold drinks, while its spoons remain intact for around 20 minutes in ice cream. Its products are used in more than 130 establishments, and the company is working towards industrial-scale production.

Legit.Health

Legit.Health develops AI-powered technology to help healthcare professionals diagnose, assess and monitor skin conditions. Its platform analyses photographs to identify more than 300 conditions, including psoriasis, eczema, acne and potentially malignant lesions.

It also measures disease severity and monitors treatment progress. The technology is designed to support earlier intervention, improve access to dermatological care and reduce administrative workloads. Customers and partners include Sanitas, Cigna and Spain's public healthcare services.

Protellix

Protellix is a biotechnology startup based in Derio, Biscay, developing AI-powered technology for protein and enzyme engineering. Launched in October 2026 as a spin-off from CIC bioGUNE, the company was founded by computational chemistry researcher Gonzalo Jiménez-Osés and biotechnology entrepreneur Juan Pablo de Giacomi.

It combines AI, physics-based molecular simulations and laboratory testing to design proteins more efficiently, with applications in therapeutic proteins, industrial enzymes and molecular binding technologies.

Lead image: The Guggenheim Museum Bilbao ( I recommend a visit if you're in town).

CoreWeave raised its 2026 forecast on Tuesday after its third-quarter revenue rose 168% to $3.66bn. It also said it would not sell more unsecured debt at current interest rates. The AI cloud company now expects $13bn to $13.3bn in revenue this year, according to its results statement. In August, CoreWeave had guided for $12.4bn to […]

Meta and TikTok lined up alongside Google at an Indonesian parliamentary hearing on Wednesday to argue against planned revisions to the country’s copyright law, Reuters reports from Jakarta. The bill would require digital platforms to compensate publishers for displaying news content and would set rules for AI. If it passes, Indonesia would become the first […]

California voters have rejected Proposition 40, a one-time tax on the wealth of the state’s billionaires. The Associated Press called the race on Monday. California was still counting mail ballots nearly a week after the 3 November election. The measure would have charged 5% on the net worth of residents worth more than $1bn. It […]

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The European Commission proposed today the Digital Fairness Act, a consumer rulebook that would ban loot boxes for minors, blacklist manipulative interface design, and put a termination button on every online subscription. The proposal would repeal the EU’s 2005 Unfair Commercial Practices Directive and replace it with a directly applicable regulation, swapping 27 national rulebooks […]

ByteDance plans to release an AI assistant similar to Meta’s Muse in the coming weeks, Bloomberg reported on Wednesday, citing people familiar with a recent all-hands meeting of the company’s AI team. At that meeting, co-founder Zhang Yiming laid out a sober timeline. He believes ByteDance can compete with Anthropic and OpenAI at the cutting […]

A UK startup developing a radically different type of computer chip has raised $30m in a reported hotly contested funding round.

Cambridge-based Tendrils Compute is looking to challenge the dominance of conventional CPU and GPU architecture. Tendrils is one of several UK chip companies, along with Olix and Fractile, which investors are backing.

Tendrils believes that general-purpose chips based on its computing model, called interaction nets, will scale without the cost diffilculties and historical designed problems linked with current CPUs.

Its technology allows it to run thousands of small processes at the same time and handle complex workloads.

Explaining its tech, Tendrils said: "Instead of starting from a sequential design, we’re building our processor to have thousands of cores operating in parallel. This requires moving beyond the notion of shared mutable memory and linear instruction sequences. To make this possible, we’re working in tandem on the open-source language Vine, which has been designed from the beginning to target a new wave of parallel-first architectures."

The startup has yet to disclose any hardware benchmarks, disclosing its performance levels.

The round was led by Benchmark with participation from Visionaries Clubs, the UK Sovereign AI Fund, FR8, Antimatter, Cloudberry VC, Conviction, Embassy Ventures, and SV Angels.

Revolut Pay is now available as a payment option on Uber, bringing the fintech’s checkout service into one of the world’s most widely used consumer apps. The integration also links rides and deliveries paid through Revolut Pay to the company’s rewards scheme. Moreover, the company says millions of its customers use Uber every month. The main […]

Emerging from stealth, Helsinki-Cambridge biotech startup Switchpoint Bio has raised  $5.3 million in a pre-seed financing round, including a $5 million investment from Treehouse Delmar Investments.

Modern medicines increasingly target precise biological mechanisms, yet once treatment begins, it can be difficult to see how an individual patient’s underlying biology is actually changing and why one patient responds while another does not.

Clinical endpoints can take months or years to read out, tissue biopsies are invasive and difficult to repeat, and conventional blood biomarkers often track outcomes without explaining the biology behind them. 

The company is advancing a new way to measure those changes from blood. Circulating immune cells carry epigenomic marks of disease, exposures and treatment.

Switchpoint Bio combines precision epigenomic profiling and AI to read that record, aiming to give drug developers a scalable view of how disease and treatment change human biology. 

For drug developers, treatment response provides an immediate application: What biology is present before treatment? What changes after a drug is given, by how much, and in what way? What persists despite treatment?

Making those changes measurable over time could provide an earlier and more direct view of mechanism, response and resistance, helping drug developers understand which patients benefit, which do not, and why. 

“Drug developers need to know not only whether a patient responds, but what biology changed, what persisted and why,” said Samuel Myllykangas, PhD, Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer of Switchpoint Bio.

“Our goal is to make these biological switchpoints visible from a routine blood sample, repeatedly and at the scale required for drug development.”

From deep cellular biology to a scalable blood measurement 

Recent advances in epigenomics, single-cell biology, population-scale datasets and AI are making it possible to connect scalable blood measurements to the underlying cellular biology of disease.  Single-cell multiomic technologies (which analyse multiple types of biological data, such as DNA, RNA and proteins, within individual cells) can provide detailed insights into how cells function.

However, they typically require fresh samples, complex processing and specialised laboratory procedures, making them difficult to use repeatedly across large numbers of patients and at multiple stages of clinical development.

Switchpoint Bio is developing a scalable approach based on targeted DNA methylation profiling directly from blood. Its assay focuses on epigenomically active regions relevant to disease and immune biology, giving deep, cost-efficient coverage of the parts of the methylome that matter most for drug development. 

Built at the intersection of genomics, epigenomics and drug development 

The company was founded by Samuel Myllykangas, PhD, and Jason Buenrostro, PhD, collaborators since developing targeted sequencing technologies together at Stanford University. Buenrostro, a MacArthur Fellow, is a professor at Harvard University, Director of the Epigenomics Program at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, and inventor of ATAC-seq, a foundational epigenomic profiling technology.

Myllykangas previously built and scaled Blueprint Genetics, which was acquired by Quest Diagnostics in 2020. 

They were joined by three co-founders: Niilo Färkkilä, PhD, Chief Commercial Officer, who brings pharmaceutical industry experience from Amgen and GSK; Jussi Paananen, PhD, Chief Technology Officer, who previously served as CTO at Blueprint Genetics; and Mitja Kurki, PhD, Scientific Advisor, who brings experience in population genomics and pharmaceutical data platforms from FinnGen, a nationwide biobank study spanning more than 500,000 participants. Paananen and Kurki have both previously worked as scientists at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard. 

The company is now moving from platform development into clinical and industry validation. Switchpoint Bio is testing its approach in autoimmune disease, including systemic lupus erythematosus (SLE), to determine whether it can epigenomically identify disease-relevant immune states from blood and follow them longitudinally through treatment. 

In parallel, Switchpoint Bio is in active discussions with pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies to define its first industry validation programs, with treatment response emerging as a key area of interest. 

“We take a long-term view, backing science we believe can genuinely change how disease is understood and treated,” said Dave Proctor of Treehouse Delmar Investments.

“Switchpoint Bio brings together exceptional scientific talent with a real path to turning breakthrough biology into evidence that helps patients, and we’re proud to support that work.”

  The financing will support continued clinical and industry validation, expansion of the company’s clinical and biobank datasets, further development of its epigenomic and AI platform, and growth of its scientific and technical team across Helsinki and Cambridge. 

Lead image: Switchpoint Bio's founding team. From left: Jussi Paananen, PhD (Chief Technology Officer); Niilo Färkkilä, PhD (Chief Commercial Officer); Samuel Myllykangas, PhD (Chief Executive Officer); Mitja Kurki, PhD (Scientific Advisor); Jason Buenrostro, PhD (Scientific Advisor).