TU Delft spinout Constellate raises pre-seed to speed up antibody screening
What's the deal? Constellate ProteomicsDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom →, a Delft-based deeptech company, has raised a pre-seed round from Graduate VenturesDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom →, Tech Scout Venture Fund, and imec.istartDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom →. The startup builds single-molecule tools that help biopharma teams judge the quality of antibody-producing cell lines earlier in development.
What's the endgame? Constellate's platform, RAYmAb, reads individual antibodies directly from small, unpurified samples. It measures attributes including titre, glycosylation, aggregation, and charge variants in a single run — tasks that traditionally need four separate assays and specialist expertise.
Why now? Constellate spun out of TU Delft's Bionanoscience department in February 2026, armed with a patented single-molecule technique. Its lab setup is operational, and early pilot customers already rely on its readouts.
What's the context? Cell-line developers screen thousands of clones, but quality problems in glycosylation or aggregation often surface only weeks later, after enough purified material exists for mass spectrometry. By then, programs may have built on a clone that was never viable. Constellate aims to deliver that data in week one.
The company deploys the technology as a service through pilot projects with biopharma contract developers building cell lines for antibody production. In parallel, it is building a standalone analytical instrument to put the platform directly into customers' hands.
Constellate is led by founder and chief executive officer Carlos de Lannoy, whose PhD work on single-molecule protein fingerprinting was demonstrated in a 2024 Nature Nanotechnology paper. Co-founders Dennis de Beeld and Arian Khoshchin bring antibody characterisation and biotech business-development experience.
Why Graduate invested: "Constellate makes high-resolution protein analysis fast, high-throughput, and accessible," the firm said, pointing to a critical drug-development bottleneck paired with "deep scientific execution."
What could go wrong? The platform's value rests on delivering useful, reproducible results in customer pilots. Moving from a university setup to a commercial instrument used across biopharma and CDMO workflows is the key test.
The signal: The round fits a broader push to make protein analysis more sensitive and information-rich — Finland's Proteins.1Dealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom → raised €4.7 million in pre-seed funding in April 2026 for a single-molecule detection platform, though its approach differs. Constellate's narrower focus on cell-line selection ties its technology to a concrete bottleneck in one of medicine's largest drug categories.
Read more: graduate.nl
Image credit: Libertas Academica
