NEW YORK--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Waypoint Bio, an AI-native biotech company using spatial biology to design next-generation CAR T therapies for solid tumors, announced today that it closed a $20M Series A financing round.
The financing was led by Amplify Partners and Elliot Hershberg will join the board of directors. General Catalyst, Time BioVentures, Mitsui Global Investments, and Lux Capital participated in the round, alongside existing investors including Hummingbird Ventures.
The Series A will fund advancement of Waypoint’s WAY-103 program into an investigator-initiated trial beginning in late 2026. Additionally, Waypoint will expand its AI and spatial biology platform and the buildout of its clinical development capabilities. Dr. Patrick Kaifosh, previously co-founder and Chief Scientific Officer of the neuro-AI startup CTRL-Labs and Senior Director at Meta’s Reality Labs, has joined as CTO, strengthening Waypoint’s leadership in AI and automation. Dr. Kristen Hege, formerly Senior Vice President, Early Clinical Development, Hematology/Oncology & Cell Therapy at Bristol-Myers Squibb, has joined the Scientific Advisory Board.
Waypoint Bio is developing next-generation in vivo CAR T therapeutics using a platform that integrates AI, computer vision, and spatial pooled screening. WAY-103, its lead program for gastric & pancreatic solid tumors, demonstrates greater than 15-fold improved potency in animal models compared to multiple clinical benchmarks, alongside reduced on-target/off-tumor toxicity. The construct was discovered and optimized through pooled head-to-head screens with spatially resolved readouts measuring how each candidate interacts with the tumor microenvironment. This creates a rich data layer for identifying first-in-class and best-in-class programs before committing to costly clinical development, while also generating the feedback needed to improve the next generation of AI models.
Waypoint is pairing its discovery engine with a clinical development strategy designed to rapidly validate their programs in clinical studies. "AI is incredibly powerful at exploring complicated search spaces, but predictions are easy, actual rigorous validation is limiting. What matters now is knowing which ideas translate to human biology and clinical success," said Xinchen Wang, co-founder and CEO of Waypoint Bio. "We built Waypoint to design therapeutic candidates with AI, evaluate them with spatially informed screening, and advance multiple of the strongest programs rapidly into the clinic. Our goal is not to produce more preclinical hits that look good in mice. It’s to also leverage capital efficient first-in-human studies to produce differentiated medicines that can lead their categories."
“Spatial biology has really picked up over the past few years because you can finally measure how your therapeutic candidates affect different local environments and cell-cell interactions,” said David Phizicky, co-founder and CSO of Waypoint Bio. “This is critical for most complex diseases and especially solid tumors, where immunosuppressive signaling and infiltration barriers can't be captured by simple readouts like tumor size - and we have a way to screen at-scale for these spatial phenotypes. We're solving not only for the T cell biology, but also interactions within the tumor microenvironment, and how the in vivo delivery vector affects all of this."
Waypoint is also advancing their WAY-200 for colorectal cancer into the clinic with this round of funding, alongside preclinical development of a deeper pipeline of in vivo CAR T constructs for other solid tumors. The platform is also being used to build proprietary next-generation lentiviral vectors engineered to be superior to current in vivo delivery systems.
"As AI models become better at generating ideas, the scarce resource is experimental systems that tell you which designs actually matter," said Elliot Hershberg, Partner at Amplify Partners. "Waypoint combines AI-generated assets with spatially resolved in vivo evaluation and a path to rapid clinical readouts. We think that combination compounds over time."
About Waypoint Bio
Waypoint Bio is developing AI-designed therapeutics using a platform that integrates artificial intelligence, computer vision, and spatial pooled screening. The company's lead program is an in vivo CAR T asset paired with a proprietary next-generation lentiviral vector, with clinical entry in China expected in late 2026. Waypoint is based in New York and is extending its platform into biologics and additional therapeutic areas.
To learn more, visit www.waypointbio.com.
Contacts
Media: press@waypointbio.com
