Analysis
Multiply Labs, a San Francisco startup building robotic systems that automate complex drug-manufacturing processes, announced a $75 million Series B in a release Tuesday, bringing its total capital raised to more than $100 million since the company's founding in 2016. The round was led by Dr. Patrick Soon-Shiong with NantWorks, with new investors AstraZeneca, Lingotto, Teradyne and Strange Ventures joining returning backers Casdin Capital, Lux Capital, Fifty Years, Ora Global and Founders Fund.
Multiply Labs describes itself as a 'physical AI' company — its robotic systems aim to close the gap between drug discovery and the slower, more manual world of biologics manufacturing, where producing a single batch of a cell or gene therapy can take weeks and depends heavily on human technicians. That positions the company closer to industrial automation incumbents like Cytiva and Sartorius, which sell bioprocessing equipment to pharma manufacturers, than to the AI drug-discovery startups that dominate most biotech-AI headlines.
Strategic money, not just venture capital
The investor list is notable for who's writing the checks: AstraZeneca and Teradyne are both potential customers or equipment partners rather than pure financial investors, a structure common in deep-tech rounds where a startup needs a few anchor customers to prove out expensive, bespoke hardware before it can sell more broadly. Soon-Shiong's NantWorks has a long history backing biomanufacturing and precision-medicine companies, giving Multiply Labs a lead investor with direct domain credibility rather than a generalist growth fund.
Multiply Labs hasn't disclosed a valuation for this round, which makes it hard to judge whether the $75 million represents a markup from its earlier rounds or a flat raise brought in by strategic investors on favorable terms — a gap worth watching given how aggressively other 'physical AI' categories have re-rated this year. Hadrian, another physical-AI manufacturer Pulse has covered, raised its last round at a valuation nearly 5x higher than its prior mark; whether biologics-manufacturing automation commands similar multiples remains untested.
The bigger bet embedded in this round is that drug manufacturers will pay for robotics even when the underlying biologics pipeline is uncertain — biotech funding broadly has been choppier than AI infrastructure funding this year, and a manufacturing-automation startup is partly exposed to how many of its pharma customers' drug candidates actually reach commercial scale. For now, the strategic backing from AstraZeneca suggests at least one major pharma company is willing to bet on that thesis directly rather than just licensing the technology.