Barcelona's ALLOX raises $10.5 million seed round to map hidden drug targets
The Centre for Genomic Regulation spin-out combines high-throughput genetics and AI to find allosteric sites on proteins. Asabys led the round, with Spain's CDTI and the Catalan public bank ICF taking part.
ALLOX, a Barcelona-based biotechnology company, has closed a seed financing round of $10.5 million (€9.4 million), the company said in a press release on 29 October. Asabys led the round through its Sabadell Asabys II fund, with participation from CDTI through its SICC Innvierte vehicle and the Institut Català de Finances (ICF).
The company also appointed Morten Graugaard, co-founder and Chief Business Officer of Orbis Medicines and a former partner at Novo Holdings, as independent chair of its board.
What ALLOX does
Most small-molecule drugs act on a protein's best-known active site. Many important targets, such as protein-protein interactions and transcription factors, have proven difficult to drug that way. ALLOX looks for other places on the protein, known as allosteric, orthosteric and regulatory sites, where a molecule could change how the protein works.
The company says it does this by measuring the effects of thousands of mutations in parallel. Its platform combines high-throughput genetics, experimental biology and AI to map the functional hotspots that govern how proteins fold and interact, including potential new binding pockets.
"The technology of Allox makes it possible to identify the functional parts of damaged proteins found in diseases such as cancer or immunological diseases," co-founder and CEO Júlia Domingo told La Vanguardia, in a translation from Spanish.
What the money is for
According to the release, the proceeds will scale the platform and fund proprietary AI models that predict therapeutic hotspots from the company's large biophysical datasets. ALLOX will also strengthen its internal drug discovery team as it moves several programmes toward a focused pipeline of its own small-molecule assets, and it aims to sign research collaborations with pharma and biotech partners.
"This financing marks an important milestone," Domingo said in the release, adding that combining large-scale functional data with predictive AI should open up a broader range of difficult targets.
Who is behind it
ALLOX is a spin-out of Barcelona's Centre for Genomic Regulation (CRG). It was co-founded by Professor Ben Lehner, Head of Generative Genomics at the Wellcome Sanger Institute. La Vanguardia reported that Asabys first invested in the company at its creation about three years ago.
Graugaard brings more than 20 years in life sciences investing, R&D, business development and M&A. The release says he led Lundbeck's $658 million acquisition of Chelsea Therapeutics and has held board roles at companies including Syndesi Therapeutics, which AbbVie acquired for up to $1 billion in 2022. "ALLOX fills a critical data gap, enabling the development of functional molecules rather than simply identifying binders," he said.
Clara Campàs, co-founder and managing partner of Asabys Partners, said ALLOX is "uniquely positioned to expand the scope of druggable biology". Asabys says it has more than €400 million under management and 24 portfolio companies, and that the investment benefits from InvestEU support through the European Investment Fund.
Why it matters for European founders and investors
AI drug discovery has attracted large sums, but many platforms rely mostly on existing public data. ALLOX is betting on generating its own experimental data first and training models on it. Investors increasingly see proprietary data as a defensible moat in AI biotech, and the strategy resembles other European data-first plays such as Adsilico's virtual patient models.
The round also shows how public money supports Spanish deep tech. CDTI, the national innovation agency, and ICF, the Catalan public financial institution, both joined alongside a private specialist investor. For founders in Spain and elsewhere, combining a lead specialist VC with public co-investors can stretch a seed round further.
Barcelona's life sciences cluster has grown around research centres such as the CRG and the Barcelona Science Park, which also announced the round. A $10.5 million seed with an experienced board chair gives ALLOX room to prove its platform before a larger Series A.
What to watch
The next milestones are the first internal programmes advancing toward candidate molecules and any partnerships with larger drug companies. The company has not disclosed specific targets or a timeline for clinical work.
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