What the business is
Cellares builds automated cell-therapy manufacturing machines and runs them as a contract manufacturer for drug developers.
The bet
That automated, robotic factories can make cell therapies at the scale of tens of thousands of doses a year, as a contract manufacturer for drug owners.
Starting capital
$355M raised by March 2025; an $18M Series A in 2019 led by Eclipse, with 8VC.
How it started
CEO Fabian Gerlinghaus, an aerospace engineer who had been chief innovation officer at Synthego, kept hearing at biotech conferences that cures existed but could not be made at scale. With cofounder Omar Kurdi he started Cellares; Eclipse led its $18M Series A in 2019 before the company had built a working machine.
What happened
Cellares chose Bridgewater, New Jersey for its main manufacturing site for talent, proximity to major airports and to avoid basing a logistics-intensive business in one location, though it is headquartered in South San Francisco. In 2024 it signed a $380M deal to reserve capacity for Bristol Myers Squibb's cell therapy drugs. Eclipse's Justin Butler likened the pairing to TSMC and Nvidia.
How it ended up
As of March 2025 the Bridgewater facility was under construction, targeting clinical-scale operation in about a year and commercial scale in two. Fortune reported no commercial doses yet.
What has to be true
Cell therapy is custom for each patient, so manual manufacturing is expensive and hard to scale, per Gerlinghaus.
Drug owners like Bristol Myers Squibb can design therapies but lack automated capacity, which Cellares sells as a foundry.
New Jersey offered biotech talent and proximity to major airports for a logistics-intensive business.
Locating the main plant away from its California base reduced the risk of relying on one location.
What can be applied
A manufacturing startup can secure its first large customer before the plant exists by selling reserved capacity, and an investor can frame it as the foundry model of chips applied to drugs.
Aftermath
As of 2025-03-24 the Bridgewater plant was still being built and no commercial doses had been made. The $380M figure is the value of a capacity reservation deal, not revenue. Fortune did not report customers beyond Bristol Myers Squibb, and the output targets are Cellares' own projections.
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