Cellares has announced that ARK Invest — known for funding technology platforms such as SpaceX and OpenAI — has joined the firm's Series D financing with a $20m investment.
The money brings the total Series D to $277m.
ARK joins other investors BlackRock, Eclipse, T. Rowe Price Investment Management, Inc., Baillie Gifford, Duquesne Family Office, Intuitive Ventures, EDBI, Gates Frontier, DC Global Ventures, DFJ Growth and Willett Advisors.
The new investment comes as Cellares reaches a series of significant milestones with its Cell Shuttle platform.
The company recently delivered its first GMP cell therapy doses to patients on the Cell Shuttle, signed a 10-year commercial supply agreement with Cabaletta Bio and advanced its global Smart Factory network in preparation for commercial-scale manufacturing in 2027.
The firm also signed a $380m global manufacturing agreement with Bristol Myers Squibb, which reserves commercial-scale manufacturing capacity in the US, Europe and Japan for BMS's cell therapy programmes.
"The science behind cell therapy is proven. The challenge now is manufacturing these life-saving treatments at the scale and cost required to meet patient demand," said Cathie Wood, founder, CEO and CIO of ARK Invest.
Cellares sits at the convergence of robotics, software and biotechnology, bringing the automation needed to transform cell therapy manufacturing from a bespoke process into an industrial-scale platform.
"We believe this type of infrastructure will be essential as next-generation therapies move into the mainstream, making Cellares exactly the kind of disruptive innovation platform the ARK Venture Fund was created to support."
ARK also praised Cellaris' Integrated Development and Manufacturing Organisation (IDMO) model, saying that the approach solved the problem of consistently manufacturing living, patient-specific therapies under GMP conditions.
It added that the model could displace three types of companies: tool developers, siloed automation companies and manual CDMOs.
"From a research standpoint, what convinced us is that Cellares' entire capability stack has been validated technically across a dozen different processes and commercially with two significant commercial supply agreements with BMS and Cabaletta," said Dr Ovid Amadi, Multiomics Portfolio Manager and Director of Research, ARK Invest.
Most importantly, the infusion of the first two patients with a Cellares-manufactured product in April of this year confirmed that the technical and commercial promise had translated into a clinical product.
"We have manufactured cell therapies on the Cell Shuttle and delivered doses to patients on schedule. That is the proof the field has been waiting for," added Fabian Gerlinghaus, co-founder and CEO of Cellares.
The question was never whether automated manufacturing could work, but whether it could work at a commercial scale and at a cost that unlocks access for all the patients in need. That is what this capital builds toward as our global network of IDMO Smart Factories comes online in 2027.
Cellares operates IDMO Smart Factories in South San Francisco, California and Bridgewater, New Jersey, with new facilities currently being developed in Leiden, the Netherlands and Kashiwa City, Japan.
Its global network provides drug sponsors with access to automated manufacturing infrastructure, ensuring consistent production standards, which it says will enable commercial-scale cell therapy production for hundreds of thousands of patients starting in 2027.