BigHat Biosciences Raises $75M Series C to Push AI-Designed ADC and T-Cell Engager Toward Readouts
核心洞察
BigHat Biosciences (搜索) closed a $75 million Series C co-led by DFJ Growth (搜索) and Premji Invest (搜索), bringing total funding raised to $223 million.
Proceeds will fund the company's clinical-stage pipeline and expand its autonomous AI platform for rapid generation of biological data used in protein design.
The lead program BHB810 (搜索), a CDH17 (搜索)-directed antibody-drug conjugate for gastric and advanced gastrointestinal tumors (搜索), has dosed its first Phase 1 patient.
BigHat Biosciences (搜索) has completed a $75 million Series C financing, bringing total funding raised to date to $223 million. The round was co-led by DFJ Growth (搜索) and Premji Invest (搜索), with participation from Catalio Capital Management, LG Technology Ventures and Sigmas Group. Existing investors joining the round included 8VC, Alexandria Venture Investments, Amgen Ventures, Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), Discovery Ventures, GRIDS Capital, Intermountain Ventures, Eli Lilly and Company, Merck (搜索) Global Health Innovation Fund, Quadrille Capital and Section 32.
The San Mateo, California-based company said proceeds will support advancement of its clinical-stage pipeline of AI-designed therapeutics to key clinical readouts, alongside continued growth of its platform for rapid data generation to power frontier intelligence for protein design.
Two Lead Programs
BigHat's lead asset, BHB810 (搜索), is a novel CDH17 (搜索)-directed antibody-drug conjugate (ADC) being evaluated for gastric cancer (搜索) and other advanced gastrointestinal tumors (搜索). The company has dosed the first patient in a Phase 1 trial, making BHB810 the first clinical program from BigHat's AI discovery platform and, according to the company, one of the first AI-driven biologics to reach human testing.
Antibody-drug conjugates pair an antibody that recognizes a specific biological target with a therapeutic payload, an approach intended to deliver treatment more selectively to cells expressing that target.
The second nominated development candidate, BHB299 (搜索), is an avidity-driven T-cell engager designed to selectively target CEACAM6 (搜索)-expressing solid tumors (搜索). BigHat said BHB299 is nearing completion of preclinical development, with human trials planned for 2027.
Beyond the two lead assets, BigHat has built a proprietary preclinical pipeline of antibody therapeutics for oncology and immunology.
"Our mission is to design transformative therapeutics by combining frontier AI with the autonomous generation of gold-standard biological data," said Peyton Greenside, co-founder and CEO of BigHat. "This financing will help us advance both sides of that mission: our pipeline of BigHat-designed therapeutics, beginning with BHB810 (搜索), one of the first AI-designed biologics to reach the clinic, and our leading platform for AI-designed biologics."
Platform Design and Data Strategy
BigHat's platform integrates frontier AI models with autonomous, high-throughput experimentation to generate proprietary biological data at scale, creating a continuous learning loop between molecular design and experimental validation. Rather than relying exclusively on existing biological datasets, the company generates experimental information tailored to specific drug discovery challenges, then uses that data to train and improve its models while guiding candidate design.
Justin Kao, Partner at DFJ Growth (搜索), said the company has enabled reinforcement learning for molecular design with a platform optimized for speed at the scale frontier models require. "This integrated learning loop is a powerful advantage, enabling BigHat to rapidly design and optimize therapeutics with the properties needed for clinical development," Kao said.
Marc Martin Casas, Vice President of Biotech and Healthcare at Premji Invest (搜索), framed the platform around a clinical failure mode in biologics. "Biologics rarely fail in the clinic because they cannot bind a target; they fail because they lack the properties that turn a promising binder into an actual medicine," he said, adding that BigHat was built to engineer those properties from the earliest stages of design.
Partnerships and Pipeline Validation
Since its $80 million Series B in 2022, BigHat has applied its integrated AI and experimental capabilities across diverse modalities, therapeutic areas and molecular design objectives. The company has forged collaborations with Amgen, Merck (搜索), Johnson & Johnson, AbbVie and Lilly. It has announced completion of a strategic collaboration with Johnson & Johnson and three project collaborations with Merck, and expanded beyond two therapeutic collaborations with Lilly by joining Lilly TuneLab, an initiative supporting machine learning-enabled biologics discovery. BigHat has also formed partnerships with frontier AI companies to deploy state-of-the-art models for agentic therapeutic design.
The company closed a $44 million Series B extension in 2025 led by pharma and strategic investors. On the leadership side, BigHat appointed Stefan Weigand, Ph.D., formerly Head of Large Molecule Research at Roche, as Chief Scientific Officer in June 2026, and John Corbin, Ph.D., previously Chief Technology Officer at Tizona Therapeutics, as Chief Development Officer in June 2023.