Cellares increases Series D financing to $327M to fund commercial-scale operations

Integrated development and manufacturing organization Cellares has added a $50 million investment from private equity firm Prime Radiant Partners to the company’s Series D financing, bringing the total raised to $327 million. The funding will help to take the company’s commercial-scale operations global, including Europe and Japan.

Prime Radiant’s experience in European healthcare services — anchored by offices in Milan, Italy and Munich, Germany — is meant to support the Cellares expansion in Europe. Cellares’ European manufacturing facility is under construction in Leiden, the Netherlands and will be GMP-ready in 2027, according to the announcement. 

“A global cell therapy manufacturing network has to be built in all major markets at once,” Fabian Gerlinghaus, co-founder and CEO of Cellares, said in a statement. “Prime Radiant’s operational depth in pharma services across continental Europe makes them a strategic partner as we expand our manufacturing presence in Europe. The investors who have joined this Series D reflect the strength of the platform and the scale of what comes next.”

Currently, Cellares operates automated “smart” factories in South San Francisco, California and Bridgewater, New Jersey. Cellares’ U.S. facilities are expected to support commercial GMP operations beginning in 2027 and provide capacity for up to 50,000 patient doses annually.

The company’s goal is to industrialize global cell therapy manufacturing with automation technology that it claims reduces labor requirements by up to 80%, facility footprint by up to 90%, and enables commercial-scale production of advanced therapies previously constrained by manufacturing complexity.

While conventional contract development and manufacturing organizations need to build 10 facilities to achieve commercial-scale capacity, Cellares contends that it needs to build just one facility by leveraging its automated cell therapy manufacturing.

In April, Cellares announced a 10-year commercial supply agreement with Cabaletta Bio, a late-stage clinical biotechnology company, to support automated manufacturing of an investigational CAR-T therapy following the first successful delivery of GMP cell therapy doses to patients on the Cellares’ Cell Shuttle platform.

The deal covers production of rese-cel (resecabtagene autoleucel) — an autologous CAR-T therapy being developed for autoimmune diseases — and is intended to provide long-term manufacturing capacity and supply predictability as the therapy advances toward potential commercialization.