ImmuneBridge Raises $7.7M
ImmuneBridge Raises $7.7M to Make Scalable Cell Therapy a Reality
Today, ImmuneBridge announced a $7.7M second seed round. This funding will help the company make significant progress toward unlocking cell therapy manufacturing at scale.
The round was led by NFX, with participation from One Way Ventures, M Ventures, Insight Partners, LongGame Ventures, T.Rx Capital, Healthspan Capital, Sand Hill Angels, and two independent investors. The round brings ImmuneBridge's total seed funding to nearly $20M and marks LongGame Ventures' largest investment to date.
ImmuneBridge’s platform screens and manufactures high-quality allogeneic immune cells at commercial scale without sacrificing quality, in order to decrease cell therapy costs and improve their efficacy.
Perhaps the most well-known example of cell therapy is CAR-T cell therapy, a promising treatment that has potential to “completely eradicate” certain forms of cancer in certain patients. But there are many emerging forms of “living medicine” with significant potential: stem cell-based regenerative therapies aiming to repair damaged tissues, natural killer (NK) cell therapies designed to enhance immune responses, and T cell therapies for autoimmune disorder applications, for example.
Taken together, the global cell therapy market was valued at roughly $7 billion in 2025 and is projected to reach $55 billion by 2035. But that potential is running headlong into a manufacturing crisis.
“If you can’t make these therapies reliably and at scale, they won’t reach the people who need them,” says Nina Horowitz, PhD, CEO of ImmuneBridge. “That’s the problem we’re trying to solve.”
Manufacturing is Holding Cell Therapy Back
Today, most companies pursuing allogeneic cell therapy face a choice. They can use cells from multiple donors – but this introduces clinical variability and is difficult to scale. Or they use induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs), which scale easily but produce immune cells that currently function poorly compared to natural ones. To improve function, companies must layer on costly genetic engineering just to compensate for the suboptimal cell quality – locking themselves into a single cell line forever.
ImmuneBridge has built a third path. Their approach is based on screening and expanding hematopoietic stem cells (HSCs) from umbilical cord blood, which preserves the superior quality of the cells and eliminates the variability challenges. The key technological advancement is IBR403, a proprietary small molecule that induces up to 100,000-fold HSC proliferation while preserving full multipotency — producing tens of thousands of therapeutic doses from a single cord blood unit, versus the tens of doses most competitors manage.
The ability to remove tradeoffs between quality and scalability could have a massive impact on the rollout of cell therapy as a modality, says CTO Rui Tostoes, PhD:
“My entire career has been about one question: How do we make these therapies cheaper and reliable enough to help everyone?” he says. “At ImmuneBridge, we’re finally aligning the biology with the engineering, and we’re seeing true scalability as a result.”
10 Therapies in Clinic in the Next 10 Years
ImmuneBridge is currently collaborating with more than a dozen partners across a variety of cell types. The new funding will support both ImmuneBridge's internal pipeline and a push to open the platform to outside partners — from early-stage biotechs to established pharma companies — enabling co-development across cell types including NK cells, T cells, macrophages, and neutrophils.
The company expects to generate animal efficacy data validating its lead program this year, with initial human trials targeted for 2028. In parallel, partners will be optimizing their screening and manufacturing processes within the ImmuneBridge platform and advancing their own assets towards IND-enabling work.
The goal? Ten therapies in the clinic over the next ten years. That may sound ambitious, but ImmuneBridge’s unique platform makes it entirely possible. This round brings the company one step closer.
Alongside the funding, ImmuneBridge announced two leadership changes. Nina Horowitz, PhD, who built the company's donor screening system and previously served as Chief Scientific Officer, has been named CEO. Rui Tostoes, PhD, a veteran of biomanufacturing systems who previously served as Vice President of Chemistry, Manufacturing, & Controls, has been named CTO.
If you’d like to learn more, you can read about the technology here.
To collaborate, reach out to hello@immunebridge.com