Cathie Wood’s ARK Invest Joins Cellares’ $277 Million Series D

Business Wire

Cellares, the first Integrated Development and Manufacturing Organization (IDMO), today announced that ARK Invest has joined the company’s Series D financing with a $20 million investment, bringing the total Series D to $277 million. ARK joins a high-caliber group of Cellares investors, including BlackRock, Eclipse, T. Rowe Price Investment Management, Inc., Baillie Gifford, Duquesne Family Office, Intuitive Ventures, EDBI, Gates Frontier, DC Global Ventures, DFJ Growth, and Willett Advisors.

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“The science behind cell therapy is proven. The challenge now is manufacturing these life-saving treatments at the scale and cost required to meet patient demand,” said Cathie Wood, Founder, CEO, and CIO of ARK Invest. “Cellares sits at the convergence of robotics, software, and biotechnology, bringing the automation needed to transform cell therapy manufacturing from a bespoke process into an industrial-scale platform. We believe this type of infrastructure will be essential as next-generation therapies move into the mainstream, making Cellares exactly the kind of disruptive innovation platform the ARK Venture Fund was created to support.”

“Consistently manufacturing living, patient-specific therapies under GMP conditions is one of the hardest challenges at the frontier of modern medicine, and it cannot be solved by manual manufacturing methods,” said Ovid Amadi, PhD, Multiomics Portfolio Manager and Director of Research, ARK Invest. “To solve this problem well, Cellares created a new type of vertically integrated company, the IDMO, which is integrating and displacing three different types of companies: tools developers, siloed automation companies, and manual CDMOs. From a research standpoint, what convinced us is that Cellares’ entire capability stack has been validated technically across a dozen different processes and commercially with two significant commercial supply agreements with BMS and Cabaletta. And most importantly, the infusion of the first two patients with a Cellares manufactured product in April of this year confirmed that the technical and commercial promise had translated into a clinical product.”

“We have manufactured cell therapies on the Cell Shuttle and delivered doses to patients on schedule. That is the proof the field has been waiting for,” said Fabian Gerlinghaus, Co-Founder and CEO of Cellares. “The question was never whether automated manufacturing could work, but whether it could work at commercial scale and at a cost that unlocks access for all the patients in need. That is what this capital builds toward as our global network of IDMO Smart Factories comes online in 2027.”

The new investment comes on the heels of Cellares reaching a series of significant milestones validating its Cell Shuttle® platform at clinical and commercial scale. In April, Cellares manufactured and delivered the first two GMP doses of rese-cel, Cabaletta Bio’s investigational CAR T cell therapy, on the Cell Shuttle, with both doses meeting all release specifications and infused into patients on schedule. The same month, Cabaletta Bio signed a 10-year commercial supply agreement with Cellares to scale rese-cel manufacturing. These milestones follow Cellares’ $380 million global manufacturing agreement with Bristol Myers Squibb, which reserves commercial-scale manufacturing capacity in the United States, Europe, and Japan for BMS’s cell therapy programs.

Cellares operates IDMO Smart Factories in South San Francisco, California and Bridgewater, New Jersey, with facilities under development in Leiden, the Netherlands and Kashiwa City, Japan. The global network is designed to give drug sponsors access to automated manufacturing infrastructure while maintaining a consistent production standard across geographies, enabling commercial-scale cell therapy production for hundreds of thousands of patients annually beginning in 2027.

About The ARK Venture Fund

The ARK Venture Fund (ARKVX) is an actively managed, closed-end interval fund that seeks long-term growth of capital by investing in both private and public equities of companies at the frontier of disruptive innovation. The fund is designed to democratize access to venture capital by giving investors exposure to high-growth private companies alongside public holdings across the full company lifecycle, from early-stage through public market transition. For more information, visit ark-funds.com.

About Cellares

Cellares is the first Integrated Development and Manufacturing Organization (IDMO), providing global cell therapy development and manufacturing services through an Industry 4.0 approach to the mass manufacture of the living drugs of the 21st century. The company enables drug sponsors to develop, scale, and commercialize cell therapies with the capacity, reliability, and economics required to meet total patient demand.

Cellares’ fully automated platforms — Cell Shuttle® for end-to-end cell therapy manufacturing and Cell Q™ for automated in-process and release quality control — are deployed across its network of IDMO Smart Factories worldwide. These technologies deliver industry-leading manufacturing economics, higher process success rates, and the ability to produce up to 10× more cell therapy batches than conventional CDMOs with comparable footprint and headcount, resulting in the lowest cost of manufacturing in the industry. The Cell Shuttle is the first cell therapy manufacturing platform to receive the FDA’s Advanced Manufacturing Technology (AMT) designation, and has demonstrated a 100% automation success rate across more than a dozen automated processes.

Cellares has achieved key clinical validation milestones, including a successful IND Amendment enabling active clinical manufacturing on the Cell Shuttle platform, and the successful dosing of first patients in a partner clinical trial — marking the platform’s transition from development-stage technology to clinically validated manufacturing infrastructure. These milestones span multiple therapeutic areas and cell therapy modalities, including both oncology and autoimmune indications.

Headquartered in South San Francisco, California, Cellares operates its first commercial-scale IDMO Smart Factory in Bridgewater, New Jersey, with additional facilities under construction in Europe and Japan. Through its global manufacturing network, Cellares is purpose-built to support both clinical and commercial programs and to expand access to life-saving cell therapies worldwide. For more information, visit www.cellares.com and follow Cellares on LinkedIn.