PomegraMultiply Labs closed a $75M Series B led by NantWorks to automate cell and gene therapy manufacturing, with AstraZeneca and Teradyne joining the round in 2026.
Key Takeaways
- Multiply Labs raised $75M in Series B funding, announced October 6, 2026, led by Patrick Soon-Shiong's NantWorks.
- New backers include AstraZeneca, Lingotto, Teradyne and Strange Ventures; valuation was not disclosed.
- Total funding now exceeds $100M since the company's 2016 founding.
Lead
Multiply Labs, a San Francisco robotics company, raised $75M in a Series B round announced on October 6, 2026. The round was led by Dr. Patrick Soon-Shiong through NantWorks. New investors are AstraZeneca, Lingotto, Teradyne and Strange Ventures. Returning backers include Casdin Capital, Lux Capital, Fifty Years, Ora Global and Founders Fund.
The company builds autonomous robotic clusters that carry out the manual steps of drug production inside existing GMP facilities. It has raised more than $100M since 2016. Valuation was not disclosed.
What Does Multiply Labs Actually Build?
Multiply Labs builds enclosed clusters of robotic arms that move materials between pieces of standard pharmaceutical equipment, replacing technicians who do that work by hand. The arms run on a rail system with a built-in elevator and use tactile sensors that measure pressure on vials. An AI model trained on customer process data coordinates the work.
The design copies the existing manual workflow rather than redesigning it. That matters in a regulated industry, because a process that stays essentially unchanged avoids a fresh round of regulatory approvals. The company says its systems work with equipment drugmakers already own.
Cell and gene therapies are the current focus. These are personalized drugs, often made from a single patient's own cells, and each batch requires extensive hand labor. Multiply Labs is now extending the platform to antibodies, viral vectors and mRNA therapies.
How Strong Are the Cost and Throughput Claims?
The headline claims are a 74% cut in cost per dose and up to 100 times the throughput of manual manufacturing. Both figures come from the company itself and have not been independently verified. The "up to" framing on throughput suggests the best case, not the typical one.
Still, the direction is plausible. Manual production of cell therapies is a major reason treatments such as CAR-T cost hundreds of thousands of dollars per patient. Labor, contamination risk and batch failures drive much of that cost, and robots address all three.
The more useful test will be commercial deployments at drugmaker sites. Named collaborators in company materials include AstraZeneca, Legend Biotech, Kyverna Therapeutics, Thermo Fisher Scientific and Stanford's Laboratory for Cell and Gene Medicine. Kyverna's pilot covers automation of its KYV-102 CD19 CAR-T process.
Why Did Strategic Investors Join This Round?
Strategic investors joined because each has a direct stake in manufacturing capacity. AstraZeneca is both a customer-side partner and a new shareholder, which signals that a large drugmaker sees robotic production as a supply question, not just a pilot. Teradyne, a publicly traded maker of test equipment and industrial robots, brings hardware experience and a possible supply relationship. Lingotto, the Italian investment firm, added its Lingotto Innovation representative Ileana Pirozzi to the board.
The Italian link extends beyond capital. Multiply Labs has also set up an Italian manufacturing subsidiary, according to its newsroom.
Compared with the 2021 Series A of $20M led by Casdin Capital, the new round is nearly four times larger. The lead has also changed, from a specialist life-science fund to a strategic investor who has built and run drug manufacturing businesses. Soon-Shiong said manufacturing cell therapies is "extraordinarily complex," a point the company's pitch rests on.
What Will the Money Fund?
The company plans to expand manufacturing capacity, speed up its product roadmap and add engineering, regulatory and commercial staff. It describes the goal as building the operational base for moving from clinical to commercial scale.
CEO and founder Fred Parietti, who holds a PhD in mechanical engineering from MIT, said robotics is the only way to deliver these therapies to patients at scale. That is a strong claim for a company whose largest deployments are still ahead of it.
What Comes Next?
The next milestones are commercial rather than technical. Pilots need to convert into multi-site contracts, and drugmakers need to file robotic processes with regulators for therapies approaching market. A single clinical-stage customer moving a product into commercial production on Multiply Labs hardware would validate the model more than any cost figure.
Competition is real. Contract manufacturers and rival automation platforms are chasing the same cell therapy bottleneck, and some drugmakers prefer outsourcing to owning equipment. Multiply Labs is betting that owning the robots in-house wins.
Outlook
Multiply Labs enters its next phase with $75M, a strategic investor group that includes a top-tier drugmaker, and an expansion beyond cell and gene therapy into other biologics. Its 74% cost and 100x throughput claims await third-party confirmation. How quickly pilot work with partners such as Kyverna turns into commercial production will determine whether the round looks conservative or generous in hindsight.
