ALLOX, a Barcelona biotechnology company, has closed a €9.4m (about $10.5m) seed round led by Asabys through its Sabadell Asabys II fund. Spain's CDTI, through SICC Innvierte, and the Institut Català de Finances, the Catalan government's financial institution, also invested. The company announced the round on 29 October 2026.
At the same time ALLOX appointed Morten Graugaard as independent chair of its board. The valuation was not disclosed.
“This financing marks an important milestone, enabling us to advance our internal drug discovery pipeline.”Júlia Domingo, Co-founder and CEO, ALLOX
What ALLOX does
ALLOX looks for small-molecule drugs that act on proteins long seen as hard to drug, such as protein-protein interactions and transcription factors. Its platform combines high-throughput genetics, experimental biology and AI, and measures the effects of thousands of genetic mutations in parallel, according to Tech.eu.
The aim is to find allosteric sites, places on a protein away from its main active site where a drug can still change how the protein behaves. The company argues that its data shows which molecules actually alter a protein's function, rather than only which ones bind to it.
Graugaard said ALLOX fills a critical data gap, enabling the development of functional molecules rather than simply identifying binders.
ALLOX is a spin-out of the Centre for Genomic Regulation in Barcelona, according to European Biotechnology. Its platform builds on work from co-founder Ben Lehner's laboratory: a method described in a 2022 Nature paper, and a 2023 study that measured more than 26,000 mutations in the cancer protein KRAS.
The only programme the company has named is ALX-001, a selective allosteric inhibitor in preclinical development, European Biotechnology reported. Domingo told the magazine that the first discovery programme has found new small molecules that act allosterically and that three more programmes have started, with an initial focus on cancer and on inflammation and immunology.
Who is behind it
Júlia Domingo is co-founder and chief executive. The company's website lists André Faure as chief technology officer, Pablo Baeza as chief discovery officer and Ben Lehner as chief scientific adviser, all as co-founders. The company is based at the Parc Científic de Barcelona.
Graugaard previously held senior roles at Orbis Medicines, Novo Holdings and Lundbeck, according to Tech.eu. Clara Campàs, co-founder and managing partner of Asabys Partners, said the firm believes ALLOX is well placed to widen the range of biology that drugs can reach.
What the money is for
ALLOX will use the funding to scale its platform and build its own AI models that predict therapeutic hotspots from its large biophysical datasets. It also plans to strengthen its in-house drug discovery team and move several research programmes towards a pipeline of its own small-molecule drug candidates.
The company wants to set up research collaborations with pharmaceutical and biotech partners as well. It did not say when it expects its first candidate to reach clinical trials.
Asabys first backed ALLOX in 2023 with a convertible loan, according to European Biotechnology, which also reported that CDTI has disclosed three earlier Innvierte investments in the company. ALLOX plans to hire a chief scientific officer and expects the seed money to carry it to milestones for a future Series A.
Company website: allox.bio