Turbine has secured $25 million in Series B funding to scale its virtual cell technology and move into immunology. The round was led by Interactive Venture Partners, with participation from Beiersdorf Venture Capital and existing investors Accel, MSD Global Health Innovation, and Mercia.

The company also announced a new immunology-focused collaboration with a top 10 pharmaceutical company, marking its first major step beyond oncology. Financial terms beyond the $25 million raise were not disclosed.

Investors Back Central and Eastern Europe Innovation

The funding highlights growing investor confidence in AI-driven drug discovery platforms emerging from Central and Eastern Europe.

“Central and Eastern Europe has produced exceptional innovation, and Turbine stands out as one of the region’s most compelling virtual biology platforms. Our team assessed the opportunity from both a technology and life sciences perspective, and we believe the ambitious team’s unique capability to virtualize biological experiments with AI positions them to be among the global leaders embedding such technology into biopharma R&D,”

Laszlo Czirjak, Managing Partner at Interactive VP.

At the same time, strategic investors are signaling interest in applying AI models beyond traditional pharma pipelines.

“At Beiersdorf Venture Capital we see clear potential in AI-driven technologies such as virtual cell models that help researchers assess how active ingredients interact with skin biology, skin conditions, and safety. Our investment in Turbine reflects our interest in deep-tech approaches that could shape the future of skin research.”

Ascan Voswinckel, Head of Beiersdorf Venture Capital.

Expanding the Virtual Lab Into Immunology

With the new capital, Turbine plans to expand its platform to virtualize additional assays across drug discovery and translational medicine. Its lab-in-the-loop system will generate new proprietary perturbation datasets, helping refine its foundational virtual cell model across new tissue types and assay formats.

These virtual assays are delivered through Turbine’s Virtual Lab, a no-code interface designed to integrate directly into pharmaceutical research workflows. Scientists can run large-scale in silico experiments and narrow down high-confidence hypotheses before moving into wet lab validation.

The newly announced immunology partnership reflects this strategy. Under the agreement, Turbine will train its virtual assays on proprietary immune datasets provided by the pharma partner. The goal is to model immune cell behavior, explore complex drug combinations, and identify which patient cohorts may benefit most.

“Combination therapies have been proven to offer patient benefit. However, given the complexity of immunological diseases and the sheer number of potential combinations, virtualization is the only way scientists can rationally explore and identify the right drug combinations, as well as which patient cohorts may benefit from them. We are excited to expand into immunology, as a new therapeutic area, to build an active learning loop where simulations inform the right wet lab experiments, which in turn generate data that improves the next round of predictions to ultimately identify a number of potentially successful immunology drug combinations.”

Szabolcs Nagy, Co-Founder & CEO at Turbine.

From Oncology to Broad Biopharma Applications

Founded to accelerate drug discovery through AI, Turbine builds virtual copies of experimental assays using its foundational virtual cell model. By running experiments computationally, researchers can test millions of hypotheses that would be impractical in physical labs.

The company works with major biopharma players including MSD, AstraZeneca, and Bayer. Its virtual assays have supported more than 30 discovery programs, helping research teams prioritize experiments and reduce trial-and-error cycles.

Turbine positions its approach as turning biology into an engineering discipline, where iterative simulations guide experimental design. With this Series B, the company is extending that framework into immunology while broadening industrial applications.

Origianl Creator: Paulo Palma
Original Link: https://justainews.com/companies/funding-news/turbine-raises-25m-series-b-for-virtual-biology/
Originally Posted: Tue, 24 Feb 2026 17:28:48 +0000