[E-Daily Marketin Song Seung-Hyeon Reporter] Mirabo Biotechnology, a company specializing in AI-based antibody drug development platforms, has secured a 4 billion won pre-Series A investment.

According to the venture capital (VC) industry on the 20th, StoneBridge Ventures, acting as the lead investor, invested 4 billion won in Mirabo Biotechnology in a Pre-Series A round. FuturePlay also participated as a co-investor in this round.

Mirabo Biotechnology is a platform company that uses artificial intelligence (AI) to support the entire lifecycle of antibody and protein drug development. Through its proprietary AI engine, “MiRAiQ,” the company accelerates the process from candidate discovery to process development and commercial production. It is headquartered in Hong Kong and has a research and development (R&D) center in Shanghai, China.

MiRAiQ consists of three engines. “PRISM” uses a computer to predict a protein’s structure, stability, aggregation, and immunogenicity without the need for experiments. “ORION” handles engineering to improve a protein’s stability, activity, and expression levels, while “IGNIS” performs bioprocess modeling and optimization. The company explained that it shortens development time and reduces the risk of failure through a closed-loop approach that alternates between AI predictions and experimental validation.

In the antibody drug development market, Mirabo is targeting the “middle ground.” The company believes there is a relative gap in the market for platforms that bridge the entire development cycle, as contract development and manufacturing organizations (CDMOs) such as Lonza and Wuxi Biologics excel in processes and production, while AI companies like Generate Biomedicine and ApSai focus on candidate discovery. The company aims to fill this gap with an externally deployable AI platform.

The company plans to expand its revenue model in stages. Initially, it will focus on subscription-based software and joint development and service agreements with pharmaceutical and biotech companies, and in the medium to long term, it expects to begin building its own pipeline.

Partnerships are also continuing. Last January, the company signed a strategic agreement with CMP Scientific, a New York-based manufacturer of capillary electrophoresis-mass spectrometry (CE-MS) equipment, and began jointly developing an AI-based automated platform to analyze and predict antibody cleavage variants and post-translational modifications (PTMs). In March, it began collaborating with IM Biologics, a South Korean bispecific antibody developer, to develop a next-generation antibody pipeline.

Meanwhile, Founder and CEO Lee Kyung-ho earned a Ph.D. in Biotechnology from Osaka University and served as a postdoctoral researcher in Chemical Engineering at the University of Minnesota. He subsequently gained hands-on experience in biopharmaceutical development and manufacturing while working at LG Chem, Sanofi, and Canton Biologics. The core management team consists of data scientists and synthetic biology experts from Wuxi Biologics and BioMap.