SAN FRANCISCO: Multiply Labs, a company that builds robotics for drug manufacturing, said it has raised $75 million in Series B funding, bringing its total capital raised to more than $100 million since it was founded in 2016.

The round was led by Dr. Patrick Soon-Shiong with NantWorks. New investors included AstraZeneca, Lingotto, Teradyne and Strange Ventures. Returning investors included Casdin Capital, Lux Capital, Fifty Years, Ora Global and Founders Fund, among others.

The company said it will use the capital to expand manufacturing capacity, accelerate its product roadmap and grow its team across engineering, regulatory and commercial functions as it moves from clinical-stage deployments to commercial-scale production.

Multiply Labs develops robotic clusters that automate repetitive, timed steps in biologics manufacturing within enclosed, GMP-compliant systems. The company said its system reduces cost per dose by 74% and can deliver up to 100 times more throughput than manual manufacturing.

The clusters are designed to integrate with a company’s existing instruments and processes without requiring a new facility or changes to already-validated practices. The company describes the system as autonomous rather than merely automated, meaning it learns, adapts and runs continuously, removing manual handoffs between process steps where contamination risk is highest.

“AI is designing more therapies than the industry will ever be able to manufacture,” Fred Parietti, co-founder and CEO of Multiply Labs, said in a statement. “This funding lets us build the capacity to close that gap, so more of the patients who need these treatments can actually get them.”

The company began with cell and gene therapy and is expanding to advanced biologics, including antibodies, viral vectors and mRNA. Its platform is owned and operated directly by pharmaceutical and biologics companies rather than run as an outsourced service.

Soon-Shiong, founder of NantWorks, said manufacturing cell therapies is extraordinarily complex and that every step must meet GMP standards.

“Multiply Labs is building robots with the potential to change the speed and scale of these therapies for patients worldwide,” he said.

Dr. Ileana Pirozzi of Lingotto Innovation, who joined Multiply Labs’ board of directors, said biologics are reshaping medicine but manufacturing has not kept pace with the science.

“We believe robotics can do for biomanufacturing what it did for automotive and semiconductors: transform highly manual, labor-intensive processes into precise, scalable production systems,” Pirozzi said.

Multiply Labs was founded in 2016 as a Y Combinator startup and is headquartered in San Francisco.