Sensible Biotechnologies raises $47M: why we backed them early, and why it’s personal for us
Today, Sensible Biotechnologies announced $47 million in financing to scale its platform for making mRNA in living cells. The financing includes a Series A led by Oxford Science Enterprises and up to $20 million in non-dilutive funding from the Government of Slovakia and the European Union.
New institutional investors OTB Ventures and In-Q-Tel are joining existing backers such as Recode Ventures, BlueYard Capital and Y Combinator. The family office of BioNTech co-founder Christoph Huber and Tim Garnett, former Chief Medical Officer of Eli Lilly, are also part of the round.
We were among Sensible’s very first investors, backing the company since 2022, so this one feels personal. Sensible was also the first biotechnology company we backed. When we met Miro Gašpárek and Marian Kupčulák, Sensible was a small team with a bold vision and years of hard science ahead. Five years after it was founded, the company has 55 people across Oxford, Bratislava and Boston, a strategic partnership with Sartorius, and its technology was published in Nature Biotechnology and Cell Chemical Biology.
What Sensible is building
mRNA changed how we make vaccines. Using it for therapeutics is quite a different challenge. A vaccine needs only a small amount of mRNA. Therapies such as cell therapies or gene editors need much higher, often repeated doses, and much purer material. Today’s synthetic mRNA production, built on technology that is more than 40 years old, cannot provide mRNA with that quality – and also makes it very expensive. It also depends on costly raw materials like enzymes, nucleotides and clinical-grade DNA.
Sensible makes mRNA in a completely different way. Its VECTOR platform uses engineered living cells to produce naturally modified mRNA, and pairs that with AI-enabled sequence design and automated high-throughput screening. In certain external evaluations, Sensible’s cell-made mRNA showed no detectable double-stranded RNA, a common cause of unwanted immune reactions. Compared with synthetic mRNA in human immune-cell assays, it also triggered significantly reduced undesirable immune activation and led to higher protein expression. Sensible’s high-throughput platform can already produce around 1,000 mRNA sequences a week.
The new funding will go into fully automating VECTOR and building clinical-grade manufacturing capacity in Slovakia.
Why we invested
We first invested in Sensible in 2022, in its pre-seed round alongside Civilization Ventures and Y Combinator, before our friends at BlueYard Capital or Amino Collective. There was no big round and no headline back then. Three things convinced us.
The real opportunity is beyond vaccines.
We believed then, and believe even more now, that mRNA’s biggest potential lies in therapeutics: cancer, autoimmune disease, gene editing, protein replacement, antibodies and cell therapies. Many of these need high or repeated doses that current production makes too expensive. Fix how mRNA is made, and all of these areas open up at once.
Two founders who complement each other.
Miro and Marian met in Oxford, two of the few Slovaks there working in life sciences. Miro is an engineer, with a degree in biomedical engineering from Imperial College London and doctoral research in engineering and synthetic biology at Oxford. Marian is a molecular biologist with an Oxford DPhil and research experience in Oxford, Gothenburg and Vienna. Between them, they cover both the biology of making mRNA in cells and the engineering needed to do it at scale.
A completely different way to make mRNA, not a better version of the old one.
The field still relies largely on synthetic, cell-free production. Sensible chose a different route and makes mRNA inside living cells instead. That is non-intuitive, but it can address quality issues, high costs, and supply chain problems together rather than one at a time. The external results Sensible has shared so far suggest the approach holds up.
We later invested again in a follow-on round, and over the years the relationship has also become a personal one. Miro is someone we talk to often, about good news and hard decisions alike.
“I have known Miro for several years now, and for most of that time we have spoken every Sunday. Those calls have become a fixed part of my week. We talk about science, the team, strategy, and whatever is on his mind at that moment. Sensible is an investment I am personally committed to, and seeing Miro and Marian reach this milestone means a lot to me.”
Jan Kasper, Co-Founder & Managing Partner, ZAKA VC
“At Sensible, we are building completely new foundational technology to unlock mRNA therapeutics, challenging the longest-standing paradigm of mRNA technology. ZAKA VC was one of Sensible’s earliest institutional investors. Jan Kasper and his Partners saw potential of new mRNA paradigm we are building at Sensible before almost anyone else did. We are fortunate to have many top-tier investors on our cap table, but level of ZAKA’s continued support and attention for its portfolio founders is extraordinary. In addition to that, there are not many investors, who have built multiple successful companies before embarking on the VC journey – but Jan is one of them. Working with ZAKA VC and learning from Jan Kasper has been a great part of my entrepreneurial journey. ”
Miro Gasparek, CEO and Co-Founder of Sensible