S2S Ventures completes first investment deal

The student-run venture capital firm S2S Ventures helps entrepreneurs and SMEs transition from the early to the growth stage of their businesses. With a CHF 10 Million Fund and a committee of students from different universities, the firm kicked off operations in October 2021.

The VC’s premier investment totalling goes to Adaptyv Biosystems, the EPFL Spinoff dedicated to closing the loop between computational prediction and experimental validation with cell-free synthetic biology and high-throughput nanofluidics. Identifying new antibodies is key to being able to combat different diseases such as viral infections, autoimmune diseases, and cancers. Unfortunately, the current process for testing the efficacy of new antibodies is slow and expensive and has a failure rate of around 88%.

Adaptyv helps pharma and biotech companies identify the best protein designs to pursue in further stages of development. The data generated by Adaptyv helps in training machine learning models to predict the properties of new protein designs. Besides being quicker and cheaper, the technology offers higher quality data on the performance of potential antibodies.

For the startup and its team of eight people, the freshly secured capital is another demonstration of the potential investors see in its technology. This year alone, the company attracted various investors for its CHF 2.5 million pre-seed round and the Wingman Campus Fund.

“The investor interest during our last round highlighted again that they understand the need for high-throughput data generation in biotech. You can design the most complex machine learning models, but the models will not perform without sufficient high-quality training data. We are massively scaling up the number of proteins that can be synthesised and tested using synthetic biology and nanofluidics. This way, we generate crucial knowledge needed to engineer new proteins for therapeutic and industrial applications”, said Julian Englert, Co-founder and CEO of Adaptyv Biosystems.

(RAN)