Chicago's Syntax Bio expands Series A to $14.4 million, adds new leadership

Syntax Bio, a synthetic biology company developing cell therapies based in Chicago, announced it had extended its Series A round to $14.4 million, bringing its total funding to more than $25 million.

The company said the new capital will support its Cellgorithm platform and fund development of a pancreatic beta cell therapy for type 1 diabetes through pre-clinical proof-of-concept.

The expanded round drew on existing backers including Astellas Venture Management, Illumina Ventures, DCVC Bio, Civilization Ventures, EGB Capital, Mansueto Office and Portal Innovations. New investors, meanwhile, include Draper Associates, Allegis Capital, LongGame, Mayo Clinic, the Illinois Department of Commerce and Economic Opportunity, Illinois Ventures, Exit Fund, Sigma Group and Walder Ventures.

"This financing enables us to accelerate sequential, endogenous gene activation technology, advance the first cell therapy discovered using the Cellgorithm platform and build collaborations to develop scalable regenerative medicines for serious diseases," said the company’s CEO, John Craighead in the announcement. Craighead joined Syntax Bio in 2025.

Tim Draper, founding partner of Draper Associates and one of the new investors, said the company's stem cell programming “addresses the central constraint in regenerative medicine: the ability to reliably and efficiently generate functional cells at population scale.”

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Leadership changes

Alongside the financing, Syntax Bio announced changes to its executive team, board of directors and scientific advisory board.

Co-founder Ryan Clarke moved from chief technology officer to chief scientific officer, where the company said he will continue to lead its scientific strategy. Co-founder Nikolas Balanis was promoted to chief technology officer and will oversee the synthetic biology platform and the company's computational biology work. Both will report to Craighead.

Meanwhile, Doug Doerfler and Pete Bodine joined the board of directors. Doerfler founded and led Nasdaq-listed MaxCyte as chief executive for more than two decades; Bodine is a managing director at Allegis Capital. Melissa Carpenter and Everett Meyer joined the scientific advisory board. Carpenter has held senior roles at ElevateBio, ViaCyte, Geron and StemCells Inc. Meyer is a professor of medicine at the University of Colorado School of Medicine, where he directs the allogeneic stem cell transplantation program.

The company said the financing follows a collaboration with Mayo Clinic, a grant from Breakthrough T1D and a peer-reviewed paper in Science Advances describing its CRISPR-based Cellgorithm technology. According to Syntax Bio, the platform uses CRISPR to program and accelerate stem cell differentiation, with the goal of making cell generation faster and more scalable.

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