Portal Biotechnologies Raises $9M, Navikenz Secures $7.5M in Life Sciences AI Funding
Portal Biotechnologies closes $9M funding round to expand cell engineering platform for drug discovery and cell therapy. Navikenz raises $7.5M seed round to scale AI transformation services focused on life sciences and pharmaceuticals.
Two life sciences-focused AI companies have secured new funding rounds, with Portal Biotechnologies raising $9 million and Navikenz closing a $7.5 million seed round to expand their respective platforms.
Portal Biotechnologies, a cell engineering and drug discovery platform company, announced the closing of an oversubscribed $9 million financing round led by NFX, with participation from existing investors including IA Ventures, Pear VC, Undeterred Ventures, IKJ Capital, and TechU Ventures. The capital will accelerate commercial scaling of the Portal® platform, which enables efficient, scalable delivery of RNA, gene editors, probes, and other molecules into hard-to-transfect cells.
Portal has surpassed over 100 customers to date, including Microsoft, Merck, AbbVie, Mass General Brigham, the Ragon Institute, and Purdue University. The company's expansion efforts are focused on novel drug discovery workflows, cost-effective multi-perturbation AI data generation, and next-generation cell therapies with academic and biopharma partners.
Recent highlights include researchers at Merck, AbbVie, and Purdue presenting novel applications of the platform. The Ragon Institute of Harvard/MIT/MGB and Microsoft have committed to a two-year project using Portal to generate model training data and map immune responses at scale. DARPA expanded its initial $8 million contract to develop a portable, field-deployable device for rapid point-of-care cell therapy production and is supporting commercialization through its Embedded Entrepreneur Initiative program. Mass General Brigham also recently presented at ASGCT on the use of Portal's platform for same-day, circRNA-based multifunctional CAR-T production.
Separately, Navikenz, an enterprise AI and data transformation company, raised $7.5 million in a seed equity funding round, bringing its total funding to $11.6 million. The round was led by Sekar PRC, Sudip Nandy, along with founders Anjan Lahiri and Samit Deb, with participation from existing and new high-net-worth investors.
Navikenz delivers agentic AI and GenAI solutions that redesign core business workflows. Enterprise deployments have delivered tangible outcomes, including over 90% efficiency improvements in complex reconciliation workflows and a reduction in regulatory reporting timelines from several months to just a few days.
The company currently works closely with life sciences and pharmaceutical companies and is selectively expanding into additional industries. Over the past year, Navikenz has achieved quarterly profitability and industry-leading revenue growth for a services-led company. It aims to continue profitable growth with a goal to double revenues every 12–18 months over the next few years.