- Cellares raised $257 million in a Series D financing, bringing total capital raised to $612 million.
- The funds will support global automated manufacturing facilities to enable clinical and commercial production of cell therapies.
Cellares announced a $257 million Series D financing co-led by investment funds managed by BlackRock and Eclipse. The round brings the company’s total capital raised to $612 million and adds new institutional investors alongside existing backers.
The proceeds will be used to build out Cellares’ automated IDMO Smart Factories in South San Francisco, California; Bridgewater, New Jersey; Leiden, the Netherlands; and Kashiwa City, Japan. The facilities are intended to support commercial launch and manufacturing of cell therapies for hundreds of thousands of patients annually. Cellares expects to support clinical manufacturing in the first half of 2026, with commercial-scale manufacturing beginning in 2027.
Cellares’ integrated development and manufacturing organization model is designed to replace manual, labor-intensive contract manufacturing approaches used by traditional CDMO providers. The company said its automated, GMP-compliant platforms are intended to support both clinical and commercial manufacturing with higher throughput and lower per-patient costs.
The company’s Cell Shuttle system enables closed-system cell therapy production, while the Cell Q platform automates in-process and release testing. Together, the platforms are designed to deliver up to roughly ten-fold higher throughput compared with conventional CDMO facilities of similar scale, according to the company.
Cellares has also entered into a $380 million global manufacturing agreement with Bristol Myers Squibb, reserving commercial-scale capacity in the United States, Europe, and Japan. In addition, the Cell Shuttle platform has received Advanced Manufacturing Technology designation from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, which can support expedited regulatory review for submissions incorporating the technology.
