Analysis
WhiteLab Genomics, a Paris-founded biotech building AI tools for genomic medicine design, raised a $26 million Series B led by AVP, Pulse 2.0 reported, with new investors Yaday Health and Blast Club joining returning backers Omnes Capital and Debiopharm Innovation Fund.
Founded in 2019 by co-founder and CEO David Del Bourgo and accelerated through Y Combinator, WhiteLab built ALFRED, an AI platform that designs and optimizes delivery vehicles for cell and gene therapies — the mechanisms that get a therapeutic payload into the right cells and tissues, often the hardest part of making a gene therapy work at all. The company has so far applied ALFRED to adeno-associated viruses (AAVs); working with the Paris Brain Institute, it designed AAVs that crossed the blood-brain barrier in animal studies with a strong brain-to-liver targeting ratio and no detectable liver signal, a meaningful early readout given liver toxicity is a common failure point for AAV-delivered therapies.
The new capital will fund expansion beyond AAVs into non-viral delivery methods like lipid nanoparticles and into programmable genetic payloads such as synthetic promoters — pushing WhiteLab toward delivery problems across more disease areas than viral vectors alone can address. The company has offices in Paris, Boston and Montreal, with partners including Sanofi, Cytiva, the University of Massachusetts and Institute Imagine, and plans to expand into the US West Coast, Japan, South Korea and Europe.
"What ultimately matters is whether those designs work in living systems," Del Bourgo said — a notably restrained framing for a funding announcement, and one AVP managing partner François Robinet echoed, saying WhiteLab is "building AI that designs genomic medicines that actually work in vivo, not just on paper." Without a disclosed valuation or a clearly comparable funded rival in AI-driven genomic medicine design, the $26 million figure itself is the only yardstick available for now — investors are pricing the science, not a competitive benchmark.