January does not usually whisper. It clears its throat and tells you who is serious. Cellares just did that out loud. South San Francisco based, founded in April 2019, built by Fabian Gerlinghaus, Omar Kurdi, and Alex Pesch, this company did not show up to cell therapy manufacturing to decorate the room. It showed up because the science was ready and the factories were not. Five years later, the gap between discovery and delivery has a name, an address, and a balance sheet that just got heavier.
This week Cellares closed a $257 million Series D, led by BlackRock with Eclipse alongside, bringing total funding to $612 million. New money from T. Rowe Price Investment Management, Baillie Gifford, Duquesne Family Office, Intuitive Ventures, EDBI, and Gates Frontier joined returning believers DC Global Ventures, DFJ Growth, and Willett Advisors. No valuation disclosed, which usually means the conversation stayed disciplined and the conviction stayed high.
The pitch is not hype. It is throughput. Cellares calls itself the world’s first Integrated Development and Manufacturing Organization, an IDMO built on automation instead of heroics. The Cell Shuttle and Cell Q platforms turn cell therapy manufacturing into something closer to an industrial system than a hand built experiment. One Cell Shuttle can run up to 2,800 batches a year. Quality control keeps pace. Compared to legacy CDMOs, throughput jumps tenfold, failure rates drop by seventy five percent, labor and space shrink by ninety percent, and per batch costs fall by as much as half.
Fabian Gerlinghaus learned this problem the hard way at Synthego, watching the bottleneck move from the lab to the factory floor. Omar Kurdi brought the muscle memory from scaling operations at Finesse Solutions, Thermo Fisher Scientific, and Synthego. Alex Pesch engineered the backbone. Today they are backed by operators like Ossama Eissa, Justin McAnear, Ali Soleymannezhad, and Jonathan Butler, a roster that reads less like a startup and more like a manufacturing company that expects to be audited by history.
Regulators noticed. In April 2025 the FDA granted Cellares the first Advanced Manufacturing Technology designation in cell therapy. In January 2026 the FDA cleared an IND amendment for Cabaletta Bio’s rese cel to be manufactured on the platform. Bristol Myers Squibb committed $380 million to reserve global capacity for Breyanzi and Abecma. Smart factories are live in South San Francisco and Bridgewater, expanding into Leiden this year and Kashiwa next.
Cell therapy has hundreds of thousands of patients waiting and less than one percent getting treated because factories cannot keep up. Cellares is not promising miracles. It is promising volume, consistency, and time back on the clock. When manufacturing stops being the punchline, the real story starts moving faster.
