Antibodies.com, a digital marketplace that enables life scientists to purchase critical research reagents at cost-effective prices from the primary manufacturers, today announced that is has raised £400,000 in pre-seed financing.

Nidobirds Ventures, after successful investment in Labstep, joined local angel investors and industry veterans in the funding round. The funds will be used by Antibodies.com to expand its catalogue of off-the-shelf reagents, implement new sales and marketing programs to drive customer acquisition, and scale its proprietary AI assisted “Product Matching” tool.

Antibodies.com enables researchers to source reliable antibodies, proteins, and immunoassays up to 5x faster and 75% cheaper than current methods. This is especially important as roughly 50% of research antibodies simply don’t work in experiments; this wastes billions of dollars of funding and countless hours each year, ultimately: slowing down studies, wasting research samples, and delaying treatments from getting to patients.

The company launched out of beta in May 2018 and has since gone from strength to strength. Antibodies.com now works with 50+ supply chain partners, offers 70,000+ research reagents, and operates across North America and Europe. Customers now include some of the world’s largest pharmaceutical companies (including Glaxo Smith Kline, Glenmark Pharmaceuticals, and Merck & Co) and leading academic research institutions (including MIT, Standard University, University of Cambridge, and University of Oxford).

“Today’s fundraise is a key milestone for Antibodies.com”

said Sebastian Newlove, co-founder of Antibodies.com & former bench scientist.

“We bootstrapped Antibodies.com from inception and accomplished a great deal of product validation, market traction, and growth. This pre-seed round enables us to significantly expand our operations and will help us achieve our vision of helping researchers discover more, for less”.

Paul Carter, senior procurement officer, commented

“The University of Manchester is delighted to welcome Antibodies.com as a life science research tool supplier. Their wide range of low cost and high quality reagents will really help support our research”.