Key Findings
Multiply Labs has closed a $75 million Series B funding round led by Patrick Soon-Shiong and NantWorks, with participation from AstraZeneca, Teradyne, Lingotto, and Strange Ventures, bringing total funding to over $100 million. The company’s robotic systems are designed to reduce the cost per dose of cell therapies by up to 74% and increase the number of patient doses per square foot of cleanroom space by up to 100x.
Technical Details
The system consists of enclosed robotic clusters that integrate into existing cleanrooms. Rather than acting as a contract manufacturer, Multiply Labs sells the hardware for drugmakers to operate using their own existing equipment. The technical specifications include:
- Hardware: Six-axis Universal Robots arms extended to eight degrees of freedom via X and Z rails.
- Control: The system utilizes imitation learning, allowing the arms to acquire new tasks through observation rather than manual hand-coding.
- Performance: Peer-reviewed work with UCSF comparing manual versus robotic processes showed a 74% cost reduction and zero observed contamination in robotic runs, whereas one case of human-induced contamination occurred in the manual comparison.
Background & Context
Cell and gene therapies for blood cancers, such as lymphoma and leukemia, currently cost between $300,000 and $2 million per dose. This high cost is driven by the need for skilled technicians to manually pipette cells in sterile suites. Multiply Labs targets this “factory” bottleneck. The company previously signed a commercial deal worth up to $85 million with Retro Biosciences in 2024.
Significance & Outlook
The $75 million investment is earmarked for expanding manufacturing capacity, advancing the product roadmap, and hiring engineering, regulatory, and commercial teams. While the reported gains are significant, the transition from demo to clinical application requires navigating strict pharmaceutical regulations and potential re-validation of approved therapies. The success of the platform depends on whether partners like AstraZeneca move from investors to paying customers for clinic-ready therapies.
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